Basque adjectives and the functional structure of the noun phrase

Xabier Artiagoitia (1)

1 UPV / EHU - University of the Basque Country = Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea

The article proposes that Basque DP-internal adjectives occupy the head position, not the specifier position, in the hierarchy of functional projections proposed in Cinque (1994) and Scott (2002). The proposal has three immediate consequences: (a) the analysis of adjectives as specifiers is not universal and is independent of the existence of the said hierarchy; (b) adjectival modification allows for specifier-head variation; and (c) word-order variation in the DP-field depends largely on the head-parameter, contrary to Kayne's antisymmetry view. The proposal that adjectives are heads is not novel in the literature (cf. Abney 1987), but it is presented here as an explicit argument for the validity of the head-parameter and against antisymmetry.

Mots clés: DP; adjective; head-parameter; adjective ordering

Xabier Artiagoitia. Basque adjectives and the functional structure of the noun phrase. 2006. ⟨artxibo-00087305⟩