chapter 1
Introduction
An overview of the volume
Alexander Grosu
Tel Aviv UniversityThe internal and external syntax and semantics of DPs in the languages of the world,
as well as the various cross-sentential relations between them found in discourses,
is a vast topic, handled extensively in any reference work, and to which countless
books and papers have been devoted, both in traditional works and in more recent
theoretically-oriented studies. Any attempt to enumerate the relevant studies exhaus-
tively would fill a large volume, and even an exhaustive enumeration of the subtop-
ics that have been addressed within the recent theoretically-oriented literature would
run for many pages. I thus confine myself to mentioning here three sub-topics closely
related to this book.
One topic that has enjoyed a considerable amount of attention in the generative lit-
erature has been the placement of various sub-elements of DPs within the DP-internal
cartography; an incomplete list of the relevant studies is: Giorgi and Longobardi (1991),
Alexiadou and Wilder (1998), Alexiadou et al. (2000), Alexiadou (2014), Bianchi
(1999, 2000a,b), Borsley (1997), Kayne (1994), Mallen (1997a,b, 2002 ), Smith (2013),
Svenonius (1994), Zwart (2000), Cinque (2002) and pertinent references therein.
A second topic, which seems to have been less extensively studied, is the internal
syntax of proper sub-elements of DP, for example, of attributive ad-nominal modifiers.
A very interesting treatment of this domain has been recently provided by Struckmeier
(2007) with respect to German. Struckmeier offers an original interpretation of the
Case-Gender-Number suffixes found on the heads of pre-nominal APs and participial
constructions, as well as on the relative pronouns of post-nominal relative clauses,
and proposes that their raison d’être is NOT to signal agreement with the head noun
(as assumed in many earlier studies), but rather to serve as a probe for targeting and
attracting to its Spec an overt or null operator within the attributive expression, so that
this raised operator (presumably by virtue of translation into a lambda abstractor),
enables the attribute to be construed as a predicate that can semantically combine with
the head noun in some way. Central to this proposal is the claim that relative clauses