Introduction 7
notes a number of subtle semantic and pragmatic differences between constructions
with pre- and post-nominal classifying adjectives.
Artur Bartnik discusses the relative order of possessives and demonstratives in Old
English and Polish, two distantly related members of the Indo-European family, which
both lack definite articles. Bartnik observes that both relative orders of these two ele-
ments are documented in both languages, but argues that they are not mere variants of
each other, rather, they need to be viewed as distinct ‘constructions’. The order demon-
strative-possessor is more common, both cross-linguistically and within these two
languages, the opposite order is cross-linguistically rarer, and subject to certain con-
straints, which may differ from language to language. An interesting claim is that in
the order possessive-demonstrative, there are independent reasons for re-interpreting
the demonstrative as a definite article, a state of affairs which is conjectured to make
speakers of an article-less language uncomfortable, thereby accounting for the relative
rarity of this order.
Roni Katzir and Tal Siloni address agreement in number, gender and case in German
(simplex) DPs, and the distribution and co-occurrence properties of the definite-
ness enclitic -en within the (simplex) DPs Scandinavian languages. The facts are well
known from both traditional and generative studies (for a detailed characterization of
the alternation of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ morphology in German DPs within a minimalist
framework see Struckmeier 2007), but the authors focus on the technical machinery
that is needed to provide a maximally general account of all these facts. Building on
Katzir (2011) and Norris et al. (2013), they consider the possibility of a general account
by relying on one of the following three hypotheses: [A] agreement suffixes in German
and -en in Scandinavian are ‘spreaders’, i.e. independent functional heads capable
of triggering concord; [B] the items at issue are ‘realizers’, i.e. meaningless markers
reflecting agreement with abstract features on their hosts; [C] the items at issue are
‘licensors’ of abstract features on their hosts. Responding to criticism by Norris et al.
(2013) of the proposal to appeal to [C] in Katzir (2011), the authors argue that neither
[A] not be [B] can yield a full account of the facts, and that an additional mechanism,
whether [C] or something else, needs to be appealed to.
Alexander Grosu is concerned with a particular type of complex DP, the so called
“Transparent Free Relative construction” (TFR), and argues contra Nakau (1971),
Kajita (1977), Wilder (1998), van Riemsdijk (1998, 2000 , 2001 , 2006a,b, 2012 ),
Schelfhout et al. (2004), and others, that TFRs are not syntactically headed by their
intuitively perceived pivot, but rather by a null Determiner, just like Free Rela-
tives (FRs), and are thus indistinguishable from FRs in their gross configurational
properties, as proposed in Grosu (2003). However, the analysis proposed in this
paper differs crucially from Grosu (2003) in assuming that TFRs differ from FRs