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Concept
Determiner phrase
Summary
In linguistics, a determiner phrase (DP) is a type of phrase headed by a determiner such as many. Controversially, many approaches, take a phrase like not very many apples to be a DP, headed, in this case, by the determiner many. This is called the DP analysis or the DP hypothesis. Others reject this analysis in favor of the more traditional NP (noun phrase or nominal phrase) analysis where apples would be the head of the phrase in which the DP not very many is merely a dependent. Thus, there are competing analyses concerning heads and dependents in nominal groups. The DP analysis developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and it is the majority view in generative grammar today.
In the example determiner phrases below, the determiners are in boldface:
a little dog, the little dogs (indefinite or definite articles)
my little dog, your little dogs (possessives)
this little dog, those little dogs (demonstratives)
every little dog, each little dog, no dog (quantifiers)
Although the DP analysis is the dominant view in generative grammar, most other grammar theories reject the idea. For instance, representational phrase structure grammars follow the NP analysis, e.g. Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, and most dependency grammars such as Meaning-Text Theory, Functional Generative Description, and Lexicase Grammar also assume the traditional NP analysis of noun phrases, Word Grammar being the one exception. Construction Grammar and Role and Reference Grammar also assume NP instead of DP. Noam Chomsky, on whose framework most generative grammar has been built, said in a 2020 lecture, I’m going to assume here that nominal phrases are actually NPs. The DP hypothesis, which is widely accepted, was very fruitful, leading to a lot of interesting work; but I’ve never really been convinced by it. I think these structures are fundamentally nominal phrases. [. . . ] As far as determiners are concerned, like say that, I suspect that they are adjuncts. So I’ll be assuming that the core system is basically nominal.
Official source
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