A New Formal Analysis of AOR

This chapter develops a new formal analysis of N modifiers by critically reviewing Cinque’s (The syntax of adjectives. A comparative study. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2010), Larson’s (Events and modification in nominals. In: Proceedings from semantics and linguistic theory (SALT) VIII, 145–168, 1998, Temporal modification in nominals. Paper presented at The International Roundtable on the Syntax of Tense. University of Paris VII, France, 2000), Svenonius’ (Adjectives and adverbs: syntax, semantics, and discourse, pp 16–42. Oxford University Press, New York, 2008), and Laenzlinger’s (Lingua 115:645–689, 2005) works on the subject and then incorporating their insights into a new cartographic framework. The new analysis postulates three sub-fields inside a full-fledged DP based on the way different kinds of RCs are distributed across nominal space. It also suggests that all functional elements merge low though they may later raise to a higher region to “pronounce” relevant functional projections in accordance with what I call the Principle of Economy of Lexical Insertion (or PELI). I also propose a new typology of RCs. After this, I show how the proposed system yields desirable results for data drawn from English, Spanish, Italian, and French which contain different kinds of N modifiers as well as focused/unfocused DEMs and/or definite/indefinite articles.