The position of adjectives and other phrasal modifiers in the decomposition of DP Introduction

Patterns in adjective ordering have long been noted, and have been characterized in impressionistic semantic terms: “inherent” properties are expressed closer to the noun (Whorf 1945), or “objective” properties are (Hetzron 1978). Such characterizations have proven difficult to evaluate, but cross-linguistic examinations regularly show that similar patterns hold across languages to a striking degree (e.g. Sproat and Shih 1991). Cinque (1994) suggests that these orders can be captured in terms of a layered functional structure in the DP: different layers of nominal structure correspond to the attachment sites of different categories of adjective. Scott (2002) and Laenzlinger (2005) expand on Cinque’s hierarchy of nominal functional projections with this aim in mind.

At the same time, expansions of DP-internal functional structure have been undertaken on independent grounds, for example by Vangsnes (1999); Zamparelli (2000); Rijkhoff (2002); Borer (2005a); Julien (2005) and others.

An important question is to what extent the decomposition of DP motivated by the order of adjectives matches the decomposition of DP motivated on independent grounds. In this article, I examine three different pieces of evidence concerning functional structure in the DP: the relative order of head-like elements such as articles, plural markers, and the noun; the relative order of phrasal modifiers such as adjectives, numerals, and (arguably) demonstratives; and the semantic arguments for layered structures put forth by Zamparelli (2000), Rijkhoff (2002), and others.

Overall, the independently motivated structures for DP decomposition do not provide the kind of fine-grained differentiation suggested by, for example, Scott (2002) for adjectival ordering (where, e.g., “length,” “height,” “depth,” and “width” are all distinguished). However, they do provide a basic framework which, I suggest, goes a long way toward explaining the cross linguistically valid generalizations that can be made regarding the order of attributive adjectives.

A side issue which is necessarily taken up in the course of this discussion is that of the order of DP-internal elements more broadly. In principle, there are three different factors which can affect word order: the basic hierarchical structure (which I assume is determined by something roughly like function–argument semantics), the order in which the function and the argument linearize when they combine, and movement. The first factor is generally taken to be invariant. Kayne (1994) has proposed essentially that the second factor is invariant as well, leaving movement as the only important factor in word order variation across languages.

To be plausible, this requires several additional assumptions. Consider, for example, the possibility that attributive adjectives attach inside DP in a way different from that of relative clauses. A language might exclusively rely on the relative clause strategy or the attributive strategy for modifying noun phrases, leading to a superficial difference between two languages which is not due to movement, but to facts about the inventories of functional items employed in the two languages, for example one has no relative head, or the other has no head that can be used to construct attributive adjectives.

In this chapter I outline such a model of cross-linguistic word order variation, concentrating on the noun phrase. Order in the noun phrase is in some ways easier to compare cross-linguistically than order in the clause, because fewer information-structural devices are employed (as noted by Cinque 2005).

The structure of the remainder of this chapter is as follows. To identify the functional structure in the noun phrase, I first examine articles and plural markers, which are attested in enough languages to give a good impression of the overall patterns possible. Then I examine some other categories that tend to be realized morphologically in the noun phrase, to give a fuller picture ofthe basic functional skeleton.

I then turn to the phrasal modifiers in DP, namely demonstratives, numerals, and adjectives, the ordering of which is famously characterized in Greenberg’s (1963) Universal 20. Finally, the relative order of adjectives is discussed, completing the sketch of the functional structure of the noun phrase.

This sets the stage for the subsequent discussion of word order possibilities cross-linguistically and how to derive them. I argue that the order of adjectives can be understood as derivative of the order of the functional material and the fact that in some languages, the functional heads in the nominal projections form clusters (along lines developed in Svenonius 2007).