Abstract
In the recent decade, Construct State nominals (henceforth CSN) in Hebrew and Arabic have been the focus of much discussion and research, resulting in many important insights. Originating with a proposal of Ritter (1987, 1988) many analyses of that construction seek to tie (at least some of) its properties to raising of N to D (cf. Ritter, (1987, 1988, 1991); Fassi Fehri (1988, 1989, 1994); Ouhalla (1990, 1991); Hazout (1990); Muhammad (1988); Duffield (1992); Siloni (in press, 1994); among others). The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, I will review and evaluate the major insights behind the N-to-D hypothesis, showing that while some of them have led to an increased understanding of CSN, the N-to-D hypothesis does not, in fact, achieve the major tasks which its proponents claim it to achieve. I will conclude that while the operation of N-to-D cannot be directly excluded, based on word order, there is no direct evidence for its existence and the word order phenomena which such an account seeks to explain must be accounted for in some other way.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Baker, M.: 1988, Incorporation: a theory of grammatical function changing, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Borer, H.: 1984, Parametric Syntax, Foris Publications, Dordrecht.
Borer, H.: 1988, ‘Morphological Parallelism: a Case Study’, In G. Booij, ed., Morphology Yearbook 1, Foris Publications, Dordrecht.
Borer, H.: 1991, ‘The syntax and morphology of derived nominals’, ms. University of Massachusetts.
Borer, H.: forthcoming, Parallel Morphology, to be published by MIT Press.
Borer, H.: 1995, ‘The Ups and Downs of Hebrew Verb Movement’, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 13, 527–606.
Chomsky, N.: 1992, ‘A Minimalist Program in Linguistic Theory’, MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics 1, Cambridge, Mass.
Duffield, N.: 1992, ‘Construct State in Irish and Hebrew’, ms. Heinrich Heine Universität, Dusseldorf
Emonds, J.: 1978, ‘The Verbal Complex V’-V in French’, Linguistic Inquiry 9, 49–77.
Fassi Fehri, A.: 1988, ‘Case Inflection, VS Order and X’-Theory’, In Fassi Fehri, ed., Proceedings of the 1st International Conference of the Linguistic Society of Morocco.
Fassi Fehri, A.: 1989, ‘Generalized IP Structure, Case and VS Word Order’, Iin I. Laka and A. Mahajan, eds., MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 10, 75–113.
Fassi Fehri, A: 1993, Issues in the Structure of Arabic Clauses and Words, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands.
Grimshaw, J.: 1990, Argument Structure, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Grimshaw, J.: 1991, ‘Extended Projections’, ms. Rutgers University
Hazout, I.: 1988, ‘Hebrew derived nominals’, ms., University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Hazout, I.: 1990, Verbal Nouns: Theta-Theoretical Studies in Hebrew and Arabic, Doctoral Dissertation, UMass Amherst.
Hazout, I.: 1995, ‘Action nominalization and the Lexicalist Hypothesis’, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 13, 355–404.
Koopman, H.: 1994, ‘Licensing Heads’, ms., UCLA.
Lieber, R.: 1980, On the Organization of the Lexicon, Doctoral Dissertation, MIT, Cambridge.
Longobardi, G.: 1994, ‘Reference and Proper Names’, Linguistic Inquiry, 25, 609–666.
Muhammad, M.: 1988, ‘On the Parallelism between IP and DP’, Proceedings of WCCFL 7, 241–254.
Ouhalla, J.: 1990, The Syntax of Head Movement: a study of Berber, Doctoral Dissertation, University College of London.
Ouhalla, J.: 1991, Functional Categories and Parametric Variation, Rutledge, London.
Prince, A.: 1973, Doctoral Dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
Ritter, E.: 1987, ‘NSO orders in Modern Hebrew’, J. McDonough and B. Plunkett, eds., Proceedings of NELS 17:521–537.
Ritter, E.:1988, ‘A Head Movement Approach to Construct-State Noun Phrases’, Linguistics 26, 909–929.
Ritter, E.: 1991, ‘Two Functional Categories in Noun Phrases: Evidence from Modern Hebrew’, Syntax and Semantics 25, 37–62.
Ritter, E.: 1995, ‘On the Syntactic Category of Pronouns and Agreement’, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 13, 405–443.
Rosen, H.: 1956, Ivrit Tova (‘Good Hebrew’), Kiryat Sefer Publishers, Jerusalem.
Szabolsci, A.: 1989, ‘Noun Phrases and Clauses: Is DP analogous to IP or CP?’ In J. Payne, ed., Proceedings of the Colloquium on Noun Phrase Structure, Empirical Approaches to Language Typology, Mouton, Den Hague.
Shlonsky, U.: 1988, ‘Government and Binding in Hebrew Nominals’, Linguistics 26, 951–976.
Siloni, T.: in press, ‘Hebrew Noun Phrases: Generalized Noun Raising’, A. Belletti and L. Rizzi, eds., Issues in Comparative Syntax, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Siloni T.: 1994, Noun Phrases and Nominalization, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Geneva, Geneva.
Tomioka, S.: 1992, ‘Verb movement and tense specification in Japanese’, In J. Mead, ed., Proceedings of WCCFL 11.
Valois, D.: 1991, The internal syntax of DP, Doctoral Dissertation, UCLA.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Borer, H. (1999). Deconstructing the Construct. In: Johnson, K., Roberts, I. (eds) Beyond Principles and Parameters. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 45. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4822-1_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4822-1_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-0-7923-5501-4
Online ISBN: 978-94-011-4822-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive