The Slavic Noun Phrase: Definiteness, Little n and Case Shift

Abstract

Slavic languages, regardless of the absence or presence of (in)definite articles, have a DP projection, which NP is embedded into. D is the locus of referentiality/ definiteness marking language-universally. There are many ways to mark definiteness in Slavic: word order, long-form adjectives, postpositional definite articles, clitic-doubling, etc. Under the assumption that Slavic NPs are DP, this paper has investigated the internal structure of nouns, focusing on definiteness marking, theta-role and case assignment of little n parallel to little v in CP, case shift, and the loci of internal constituents in DP. Moreover, nouns are divided into simple nouns and process nouns. Process nouns cannot have two genitive adnominal complements at the same time, while simple nouns can. There seems to be a hierarchical order among complements, adjuncts, and specifiers so that they merge together grammatically: complement > adjuncts > specifiers. Apart from what has been investigated here, there are many unsolved problems about the Slavic noun phrases, including headedness issues of DP or NP, extractions of specifiers or complements, and usage with quantifiers, etc. It is worthwhile to explore all these issues extensively later.