Subject: Re: [lojban] Chomskyan universals and Lojban

From: And Rosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 13:43:27 +0100

>>> John Cowan <[email-masked]> 08/22/01 08:19pm >>>
#And Rosta wrote:
#># [...] French, where
#>#nouns cannot serve the purposes of noun phrases (a raw noun without
#>#a determiner is ungrammatical). Can you spell this out a little more?
#> Nowadays those French NPs would be analysed as DPs, determiner
#> phrases.
#
#How does that help? Raw determiners are no more grammatical
#than raw nouns.

Raw determiners = pronouns. For those determiners that can't occur
in the raw, they take an obligatory NP complement.

I should add that 'NP' structure in Western IE lgs has been the subject of decades-long debate in linguistics. It is a famous thorny problem.
(The debate is between those who take the N as head and those who take the D as head. In my view, when debates go on and on without being resolved, itis usually the case that neither side is truly right, and indeed my own view is that another, third, analysis is correct.)

--And.