Volume 60, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Typologizing the noun phrase; Guest Editors: Dana Louagie and Uta Reinöhl

This article develops foundations for a new typology of nominal expressions. Despite the significant diversity attested in languages around the world, a view traditionally and sometimes still found holds that languages either have ‘classic’, rigidly structured noun phrases (NPs) or lack them. A simple dichotomy, however, does not adequately represent the significant language-internal and crosslinguistic diversity of forms and functions of nominal expressions. While many linguists may not in fact think in such binary terms, a comprehensive typology is still wanting. This article offers foundations towards such a typology, with a particular emphasis on language-internal diversity. This diversity within languages has received little attention in previous studies, even while it reveals much about the actual complexity in the nominal domain. Besides surveying structural types and their motivating factors across as well as within languages from around the world, this article approaches nominal expressions also from a variety of other perspectives to enrich our understanding of them. This includes approaching nominal expressions from the perspective of word class systems as well as diachronically. We round off the article by looking at the impact of orality-literacy dimensions and communicative modes.

To clarify the role of prosodic phrasing in the emergence of phrase structure, it is necessary to be clear as to how syntactic phrasing relates to prosodic phrasing. The core proposal here is that a distinction must be made between two basic types of syntactic constructions; namely, syntactic configurations for which prosodic phrasing is part of the definition of the construction, and phrase structure proper, which is independent of prosodic phrasing. This distinction implies a somewhat more complex view of the interface between syntax and prosody than is currently widely assumed. Rather than conceiving of prosodic phrases as derivative of syntactic phrases, prosodic phrasing and syntactic phrase structure are seen here as alternative ways of relating words to each other, forming larger units from smaller ones. Against this background, the emergence of phrase structure is conceived of as the emancipation of syntax from prosodic scaffolding.

The article deals with attributive modification in South American languages. It focuses on descriptive terms that denote properties. First of all, it is observed that attributive modification with property terms is possible in most, but not all South American languages. The typology of attributive constructions is argued to constitute a continuum, from syntactically loose nominal expressions, on the one hand, to morphologically complex structures which are ambiguous between compounding and derivation, on the other hand. The latter involves the use of lexico-grammatical means such as classifiers. The paper also raises the question of a possible diachronic link – at least for some languages – between intransitive clauses and postnominal property terms, which are often verbal in nature.

This paper focuses on the noun phrase in Tanti Dargwa (East Caucasian) and presents evidence for the distinction between modifiers proper (adjectival phrases, participial relative clauses and non-genitive adnominal NPs) and determiner-like elements (demonstratives, indefinite pronouns, numerals and most quantity expressions) in this language. Crucially, this dichotomy, which presumably reflects the distinction between the determinative and descriptive components in the NP, is realized in Tanti Dargwa mostly morphologically – in the distribution of “attributive markers” and in the expression of number. Syntactically, in the most neutral constructions the order of elements other than the head is virtually free and does not display any scope-related effects, while the head occupies the final position. In addition, Tanti Dargwa shows marginal constructions (a right-periphery construction locating a modifier after the head and a construction showing quasi-incorporation of a modifier into the noun) which are restricted to modifiers. Tanti Dargwa data support the idea that the description/determination distinction is gradual rather than discrete, as there are elements that show behavior intermediate between modifiers proper and determiner-like elements: possessor NPs, contrastive modifiers and the expressions like ‘other’.

This article considers NP complexity and discontinuity in the Papuan language Coastal Marind. First, I give an overview of NP structure in the language, which is characterized by extremely limited possibility of elaboration and modification. I connect this to the observation that Papuan languages are characterized by exceptionally simple NP structures. The lack of research makes it difficult to evaluate the significance of such observations, but I suggest that Coastal Marind is an example of a Papuan language that imposes very strict upper boundaries on NP complexity. Second, while an argument could be made that Coastal Marind NPs allow considerable discontinuity, more thorough consideration of the facts reveals a fundamental, tight-knit, left-branching NP structure, which contrasts with relatively rarely employed looser nominal configurations, including discontinuous nominal expressions. The discontinuous construals are restricted primarily by information structure. Although considered grammatical by speakers, they are extremely rare in corpus data. I propose that aboutness is an important factor constraining the choice of nominal construal types in Coastal Marind discourse.

This article builds on observations from several research areas which hitherto have been pursued relatively independently of one another, to argue that discontinuous nominal expressions are one of the attested strategies for marking a subtype of sentence focus constructions known as thetic constructions. This analysis can be applied to the type of discontinuity termed extraposition from subject NP/DP in languages with otherwise strongly configurational nominal expressions such as English. For these constructions, however, it cannot be ruled out that weight/length is an alternative or additional motivation. Evidence from several Australian languages, where discontinuous subjects usually just involve a semantic head and a modifier, can be used to show that this strategy is attested even where weight is not a plausible factor. Like other construction types that are associated with theticity crosslinguistically, discontinuous nominal expressions are saliently distinct from topic-comment (“categorical”) constructions and thus obey the principle of detopicalization identified by Lambrecht, Knud. 2000. When subjects behave like objects: An analysis of the merging of S and O in sentence-focus constructions across languages. Studies in Language 24(3). 611–682. The findings support the hypothesis that the principle of iconicity of distance, which ensures contiguity of the subconstituents of a phrase under most circumstances, will only be overridden if another principle motivates this violation. Such competing principles include highlighting a contrastive modifier and the distribution of weight, both discussed in previous literature. Here it will be argued that detopicalization can be added to this list since discontinuity prevents the assignment of topic status to the subject expression. Moreover, a construction where a discontinuous subject frames the entire clause is itself iconically motivated by the principle of informational integration which results in the unitary, non-bipartite nature of the construction generally associated with theticity.

Nominal expressions in the Bantu languages have extraordinary typological characteristics. Their word order patterns are extremely diverse and some of the attested patterns are crosslinguistically very rare, or even unique. The same diversity can be found in the number of agreement marker paradigms. Equally remarkable are the prosodic idiosyncrasies found at the level of nominal expressions, especially the existence of prosodic boundaries associated with certain types of adnominal modifiers. Although logically unrelated, I argue that these typological characteristics can be accounted for by a single diachronic scenario here called the AMAR mechanism: a double tendency in the Bantu languages for the emergence of construals in which a nominalized modifier is in apposition to the phrase that contains its semantic head and for such appositional construals to be gradually reintegrated into a single nominal constituent. This paper aims to summarize some of the more remarkable typological characteristics of nominal expressions in the Bantu languages and to lay out the AMAR mechanism as a hypothetical diachronic explanation for many of them.