Apulian Binominal Qualitative Noun Phrases
Angelapia Massaro
January 2021 

We investigate the morphosyntax of qualitative binominal constructions (QBCs) in a Southern Italo-Romance language from the Apulian town of San Marco in Lamis. QBCs are complex noun phrases like ‘a jewelN1 of a villageN2’, appearing here prepositionally (with the preposition də,‘of’, allowing definites, indefinites, and demonstratives) and non-prepositionally (only allowing definites with definite articles and not proper names). We propose that in the latter, a categorial match in the determiner layer, which we call ‘match D’, relates N1 and N2. N1 is embedded as a noun, allowing for: 1) the recursive DP strategy of non-prepositional genitives, and 2) the extension of this mechanism to QBCs. This leads to the impossibility of syntactic extraction, which we connect to the concept of phase. With non-denominal N1s, N1’s article is treated as a head-agreeing adjectival linker, forming a constituent with the modifier but agreeing with the head. A phrase is interpreted as a QBC if N1 and N2 share the same number features and if the features of N1 do not allow for it to be interpreted as the possessum of N2. We also discuss external agreement with the construction, presenting data supporting the relevance of the [+HUMAN] feature for agreement relations(Forthcoming, Italian Journal of Linguistics)

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006400 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	forthcoming, Italian Journal of Linguistics)
keywords:	apulian, phases, binominal qualitative noun phrases, agreement, semantics, morphology, syntax
previous versions:	v3 [January 2023] v2 [March 2022] v1 [January 2022]
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