engleski

Empirical evidence for the functional determiner projection in Croatian

Empirical evidence for the functional determiner projection in Croatian A common view in generative literature seems to be that there are good reasons to assume in addition to a lexical layer also a functional projection layer for nominal phrases. Since the formulation of the DP-hypothesis (Abney, 1987) it is also assumed that this functional layer includes the determiner (D) category. While the D category is a category mainly motivated on syntactic grounds, i.e. one that subsumes different lexical classes (and subclasses), various researchers engaged in the debate whether the D category can be motivated or argued for in languages without an overt article system, closely linking it to this particular lexical class only. In particular with respect to Croatian, there are various opinions about the motivation for the assumption of a D category (Progovac, 1995 ; Leko, 1995 ; Aljović, 2002), and some strong claims are made about the lack of empirical evidence for it in this particular case (Zlatić, 1997 ; Bošković, 2004). While the direct transfer of the empirical arguments from English and other Germanic languages to Croatian and other Slavic languages often is problematic, there remains enough empirical evidence for the assumption of a syntactic category of the D type, that subsumes the same set of lexical classes found in the respective Germanic languages, with articles missing in the lexical base, and thus also in the syntactically motivated D category. In this presentation we discuss some empirical facts of Croatian, which support the assumption that even in a language without lexical articles the D category is well motivated. Among the empirical data we discuss verbs that impose specific restrictions on their arguments. For example the verb misliti (“to think”) has various constituent selection (c-selection) properties, where it either requires a clausal complement as in (1a), or a prepositional phrase complement (1b). a. Ivan misli [ da će Marija sutra stići ] I. thinks that will M. tomorrow arrive b. Mislim o ljubavi. think about love On the other hand, the subcategorization frame of verbs like misliti also licenses constructions as in (2), where obviously demonstratives and quantifiers can head syntactic constructions that satisfy the verbal subcat restrictions, while bare nouns for example cannot. a. Mislim to. think this b. Mislim nešto. think something c. Mislim sve to. think all that d. Ništa ne mislim. nothing not think We argue that these structures are best described as projections of D categories, and that in fact the selection restriction excludes other nominal categories. We support the assumption of a functional category D in Croatian with further empirical evidence and theoretical considerations.

DP-hypothesis; Croatian; functional category

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