Theory of Nouns: The Hindi Noun Phrase

By Anil Thakur

This book studies the nouns at their syntactic level and compares their internal structure with that of the verbs. The major part of the book is drawn from my doctoral work on the structure of the Hindi nouns within the theoretical approach of determiner phrase analysis in the generative linguistics framework. The book investigates the structure of the nominal phrase in Hindi under the theoretical assumptions that nouns and verbs parallel in their internal structure. That is, nouns and verbs and for that matter other words, that either associate with the nouns or the verbs, are identical inside, in their internal world. This assumption has been called determiner phrase analysis of the nominal elements in the existing literature (Abney 1987). I draw upon evidence from the different phenomena of the nominal phrases, such as the genitive constructions, (in)definiteness, focus and topic inside them, displacement phenomenon within the noun and the gerund constructions. The study is reported in three chapters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Feb 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781482845822

Anil Thakur

Dr Anil Thakur obtained his PhD in Linguistics from University of Delhi specializing in generative grammar and comparative linguistics analysis. Presently he teaches at the Department of Linguistics of Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India.

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Contents

Preface

List of Abbreviations and Special Symbols

Chapter One Theory of Nouns

1.1 Introduction

1.2 The DP hypothesis (Abney 1987)

1.2.1 The motivation

1.2.2 The basic questions

1.2.3 Inflectional elements in Noun Phrase

1.2.4 Functional vs. Lexical categories

1.2.5 Gerunds

1.3 Some post-Abney (1987) works on DP

1.4 Some basic assumptions of the Minimalist Program

1.4.1 Level of representation

1.4.2 Operations: Merge and Agree

1.4.3 Bare phrase structure

1.4.4 Lexicon

1.4.5 Types of features

1.4.6 Functional categories

1.4.7 Some observations on DP

1.5 Existing works

1.5.1 Pre-DP literature

1.5.2 DP literature

1.5.2.1 Badge Phrase

1.5.2.2 Gerund as DP

1.5.3 DP in Indian languages

1.5.3.1 KP in Bangla

1.5.3.2 KP/ClP and NumP in Oriya

1.5.3.3 AgrPn in Malayalam

1.5.3.4 DP in Bangla

Chapter Two The Hindi Noun Phrase

2.1. Outline

2.2. Hindi nominals: Some descriptive facts

2.3 Structure of the Hindi nominal

2.3.1 (In)definiteness marking strategies in Hindi

2.3.2 Word order and movement within the DP

2.3.3 Agreement inside nominals

2.3.4 The clausal constituents

2.4 Gerunds

2.4.1 Types of gerunds

2.4.2 The structure of gerund

Chapter Three Concluding Remarks

References

PREFACE

T heory of Nouns examines the internal structure of nouns. Nouns are words denoting names. In grammar, nouns denote words that denote names: names of objects, concepts and anything that we give a name to. In natural language grammars, nouns are contrasted with verbs although the later are also names denoting event, process, etc. Nouns and verbs are fundamental classes of words making two broad families to which the other words either belong to or associate with. However, the internal structure and the syntactic distribution of words across this distinction show fundamental underlying uniformity. The book studies nouns at the syntactic level and compares their internal structure with that of the verbs. The major part of the book is drawn from my doctoral work on the structure of the Hindi nouns within the theoretical approach of determiner phrase analysis in the generative linguistics framework. The book investigates the structure of the nominal phrase in Hindi under the theoretical assumptions that nouns and verbs are parallel in their internal structure. That is, nouns and verbs and for that matter other words, that either associate with the nouns or the verbs, are identical inside, in their internal world. This assumption has been called determiner phrase analysis of the nominal elements in the existing literature (Abney 1987). I draw upon evidence from different phenomena of the nominal phrases, such as the genitive constructions, (in)definiteness, focus and topic inside nouns, displacement phenomenon within noun and the gerund constructions. The study is presenteded in three chapters.

In chapter one, a theoretical outline is briefly sketched outlining the theoretical issues behind the motivation of the determiner phrase analysis of the nominal phrase. I present a brief outline of Abney (1987), a seminal work on the determiner phrase hypothesis of the nominal phrases. I also present a brief overview of some of the subsequent works on the determiner phrase analysis of noun phrase in various languages including some of the Indic languages. I sum up with a brief outline of the basic assumptions of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995), the grammatical framework within which I present my study of the nouns. I also present a brief survey of literature on the nominal phrase in Hindi as well as a brief outline of some of the works on the nominal phrase in other Indian languages that have been done under the determiner phrase hypothesis approach.

In chapter two, the internal structure of the nominal phrase in Hindi is investigated. I examine various phenomena within the noun phrase to locate functional elements associated with the nominal phrase in Hindi. In particular, I study the genitive construction, agreement within the nominal phrase, the (in)definiteness feature of the nominal, the respective positions of the different prenominal elements, and the focus- and topic-related movements inside the noun phrase. The investigation of these issues presents evidence for clause-like features within the nominal phrase showing a structural parallelism between a nominal phrase and a clause. For instance, the syntax of the genitive construction gives evidence for a subject-like position within the nominal phrase that necessitates positing a determiner phrase projection to account for the genitive case of the subject nominal. However, the observation on the agreement pattern within the nominal phrase in Hindi indicates that the genitive case is not associated with the agreement. The discussion on the (in)definiteness marking system in Hindi shows that Hindi does not have a well-defined definiteness marking mechanism in its nominal system. It also shows the lack of a single (in)definiteness marking element within the nominal phrase. Therefore a set of devices are resorted to in order to mark (in)definiteness of a noun in Hindi, including extra-grammatical devices. However, the discussion shows that the presence or absence of a definite determiner is not the sole criterion for positing a determiner phrase projection within the nominal phrase. This is shown by assuming that nominals are universally assigned a D(determiner) feature. The requirement of feature checking necessitates positing a determiner projection within the nominal phrase. Besides the evidence from the genitive constructions, the occurrence of a universal D-feature in the nominal system constitutes the main criterion for positing a determiner phrase projection within the nominal phrase.

I also examine the position of demonstrative elements and certain movement phenomena associated with them to show that the focus-like interpretation of the demonstrative element, particularly when it occurs before the genitive nominal, presents evidence for the occurrence of a focus projection within the nominal phrase in Hindi. On this basis, I propose a FocP (Focus Phrase) below the DP (Determiner Phrase) projection within the Hindi nominal. The placement of adjectives within the nominal phrase is another basis for positing a FocP within the Hindi nominal phrase. It shows that adjectives in Hindi can occur before the quantifier elements only when they are marked for focus interpretation. The book further examines the role of -wala (and also -sa) as the contrastive focus marking suffixes with respect to adjectives in Hindi to support the argument.

The book examines the case of (left) fronting of the different prenominal constituents (as well as the head noun itself) within the nominal phrase in Hindi and shows that they are amenable to an analysis according to which they are treated as topic-related movement. On this basis, a TopP (Topic Phrase) is proposed within the DP in Hindi as the uppermost functional projection. It also presents arguments for a KP (Case Phrase) projection as a functional projection within the Hindi nominal phrase. It shows that for the checking of the case feature on the prenominal elements (as well as the oblique case feature of the head noun) the whole DP needs to undergo a movement to the Spec(ifier) of KP. The book further discusses the structure of the relative clause constructions in Hindi. The proposal in Kayne (1994) is followed to account for the different positions of the occurrence of the relative clause.

The structure of gerunds in Hindi is also examined in this chapter. It shows that the determiner phrase analysis of gerund constructions accounts for their mixed properties by showing that the Hindi gerund is a nominal phrase headed by a nominal functional element D. At the same time, gerunds also contain a verbal projection in their internal structure, which accounts for their mixed properties. The verbal and the nominal properties of the gerund constructions are discussed. The verbal properties include the existence of argument structure as well as an aspectual feature associated with the root verb from which the gerund is derived. I argue, on this basis, for an AspP (Aspect Phrase) within the structure of the Hindi gerund. The chapter three finally summarizes the major points discussed in the book.

List of Abbreviations and Special Symbols

CHAPTER ONE

Theory of Nouns

1.1 Introduction

T he issue of verb and noun opposition has been an important topic of research in the grammar of a natural language. The topic has attracted considerable attention from linguists, grammarians and philosophers of language. Within the modern generative linguistic theories, too, the topic has received considerable amount of attention. The generative grammar framework made a significant beginning on this topic with Lees (1960). Chomsky’s Remarks on Nominalization (1970) began a tradition of analysis of the nominals with major focus on their functional structure. It specifically pointed out a parallelism between the internal structures of VPs and NPs. With the proposal of X-bar theory (Jackendoff 1977), the issue was further taken up for close examination. Jackendoff proposed that all the heads project four levels of structure, with the fourth level the maximal projection of the head, XP. Further, he claimed that the internal structure of all projections had parallel positions vis-a-vis Head, Specifier, and Complement. Stowell (1981) further refines the X-bar theoretic assumptions and the thesis of a structural parallelism across categories. Chomsky (1986) recognizing only two levels of projection gave the final shape to the cross-categories X-bar theoretic structure, which remained the standard assumption within the pre-Minimalist framework. In the traditional X-bar theoretic framework, the nominal phrases are the maximal projection of N (Jackendoff 1977, Chomsky 1981, 1986), as in (1).

(1) 36152.png

The developments in the eighties (Szabolcsi 1983, 1987, Abney 1987) with growing interest in the study of nominal system put serious questions to the traditional approach to the study of the structure of noun phrase. This was obviously influenced