The Noun Phrase [Paperback]

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 an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics, University of Aarhus, Denmark. Upon gaining his Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam (1992), he was appointed as a senior researcher at the same institution before going on to become Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Konstanz in Germany (1995). From 1990-5, Professor Rijkhoff was also a core member of Theme Group II (Constituent Order) in the European Science Foundation's 'Program in Language Typology EUROTYP '.