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Noun phrase in the generative perspective aims to be a broad compendium of studies on 'everything nominal'. It is written by three well-known experts in the field who work in the tradition of generative grammar, in particular, the so-called cartographic approach developed in Rizzi (1997), Cinque (1999) and later work. The book is primarily devoted to the syntax of the internal structure of noun phrases, i.e. Determiner Phrases (DPs) in the analysis put forth by Abney (1987) (discussed and adopted throughout the book), but also addresses central issues in the study of the syntax-semantics interface.
The volume is divided into four parts. Part I, 'Introduction', gives an overview of some basic concepts in Government and Binding Theory and Minimalism, including the evidence for functional projections (FPs), XP-shells and parametric variation in linear order. This part is not centered on noun phrases, requires some previous knowledge of syntax (the reader should be reasonably familiar with constituent structure, movement and the technical notion of agreement) and provides the theoretical background for the rest of the book. The sentential phenomena discussed here are mostly those for which a parallel form has been claimed to exist inside DPs.
Part II, 'The functional make up of the Noun Phrase', focuses on articles and demonstratives, determinerless nominals across languages, proper names and DP-internal functional projections. Part III, 'Modification relations inside the DP', deals with attributive adjectives and their sequencing, pseudo-partitives (e.g. a number of objections), the N-of-N construction (e.g. a jewel of a car), and more generally, predication inside DP and DP-internal predicate raising. Finally, part IV, 'DP-internal arguments', discusses the types of arguments taken by deverbal nominals as contrasted with the corresponding verbal arguments, but also the realization of genitive arguments and non-arguments, with a brief appendix on inalienable possession constructions.
As mentioned above, the aim of the volume is not to present an original theory of DPs at large, but rather to collect, summarize and partly evaluate the work done on this vast area. Indeed, the amount of literature covered in this book is immense, and any scholar interested in noun phrases will find in it an extremely valuable tool to get a global picture of many phenomena related to nouns, their articles and their...