Basic English Grammar with Exercises

Why the Noun is not the Head of the DP

There are syntactic reasons, then, for considering these phrases to be headed by the
preposition and thus it seems better to assume that the most important semantic word
is not always the syntactic head.
A second observation that might support the assumption that the noun and not the
determiner is the head of the phrase is the fact that the noun contributes features which
play a role in interpreting the meaning of the whole phrase:

(8) a the mouse
b the mice

In (8a) the whole phrase is considered to be singular and in (8b) the phrase is plural, as
can be observed from facts concerning verb agreement:

(9) a the mouse is eating the cheese
b the mice are eating the cheese

As is is the form of the verb ‘to be’ that agrees with a third person singular subject
and are is the form agreeing with a third person plural one, we can conclude that the
phrases sitting in subject positions have these properties. Thus it would seem that the
noun projects its number features to the whole phrase. We have said that projection is
something that concerns heads and so this might be taken as evidence that the noun is
the head.
Again, however, this is not an entirely unproblematic assumption. Many
determiners carry number features of their own:

(10) a these people these person
b all answers all answer
c each prescription each prescriptions
c an occasion an occasions

In these cases both the nouns and the determiners are marked for number and so it is
difficult to say where the number feature of the whole phrase is projected from.
Indeed, even in those cases such as (8a) and (8b) where it looks as though the number
is projected from the noun, we could argue that the determiner the is ambiguously
marked for singular or plural and, like the other determiners, when it is singular it can
only accompany a singular noun and when it is plural it can only accompany a plural
noun. The issue therefore rests on which we take to be the head: the determiner or the
noun. For this reason, we cannot use these observations to argue in favour of one or
the other having head status but we must look elsewhere to resolve the issue.
The assumption that the determiner is not the head leads to further problems for the
analysis of determiners and pronouns themselves. First consider the determiner. If this
is not the head then it is presumably an adjunct or a specifier within the NP. We should
therefore expect it to behave as such. Determiners do not appear to be adjoined within
the NP as they do not behave like adjectival modifiers, which we have analysed as N'
adjuncts in the previous chapter. Adjectives are recursive modifiers of nouns and can
normally be arranged in any order, as we might expect of an adjunct:

plural determiners

singular determiners