The Layered DP

This book examines argumental un-NPs and du/des-NPs in French: nominals with the indefinite article and with the so-called ‘partitive article’ respectively. The main aim is to account for the different interpretations of these indefinites and to determine how interpretation and structure are related. This study thus concerns the syntax-semantics interface, with an emphasis on the composition of the left periphery and the inflectional domain of the indefinites mentioned. It is realized in the framework of generative grammar and in a cartographic approach. A crucial proposal put forward in this book is that indefinites of different semantic types are associated with different left peripheries. The analysis further suggests that the inflectional domain of these indefinites may comprise three discrete functional projections encoding the features [count], [quantity] and [number]. Interestingly, these results seem to extend to a selection of bare nouns in Romance and Germanic languages.

Ur Shlonsky, University of Geneva:
This extremely well written monograph studies the correlation between the diverse interpretations of indefinite noun phrases and their syntactic structure or form. Ihsane argues, quite convincingly in my view, that distinct semantic interpretations are structurally dependent one on the other and that this dependency can be expressed in terms of syntactic domination. The proposed structures provide a neat solution to various problems relating to scope dependency.