The Noun Phrase [Hardcover]

Jan Rijkhoff investigates noun phrases--linguistic constructions with the noun as central element--in a representative sample of the world's 6000 languages and proposes a semantic model to describe their underlying structure. Assuming no knowledge of any formal or functional theory of grammar, he shows that the noun phrase word order patterns of any language can be derived from three universal ordering principles and furthermore that these principles are elaborations of a general ordering strategy, by which elements that belong together semantically tend to occur together syntactically.

1. Preliminaries
2. Nominal Subcategories: Seinsarten
3. Nouns: Real and Apparent Nominal Subclasses
4. Qualifying Modifiers in the Noun Phrase
5. Quantifying Modifiers in the Noun Phrase
6. Localizing Modifiers in the Noun Phrase
7. The Underlying Structure of Noun Phrases
8. Ordering Principles, Domain Integrity, and Discontinuity
9. Greenbergian Word Order Correlations and the Principle of Head Proximity
10. The Principle of Scope
11. Epilogue

Jan Rijkhoff is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics, University of Aarhus, Denmark. He was previously a senior researcher in the Department of Linguistics, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. From 1990-1995, he was a core member of the Theme Group II (Constituent Order) of the European Science Foundation's 'Program in Language Typology EUROTYP ', and in 1995 was Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Konstanz, Germany.