Examples
In the determiner phrases below, the determiners are in boldface: a little dog, the little dogs (indefinite or definite article) this little dog, those little dogs (demonstrative) every little dog, each little dog, some little dog, either dog, no dog (quantifying)

In linguistics, a determiner phrase (DP) is a syntactic category, a phrase headed by a determiner. On the DP-hypothesis, the noun phrase is strictly speaking a determiner phrase, and NP designates a subpart of the noun phrase, often taken to be the complement of the determiner.^[1][2] This is opposed to the traditional view that determiners are specifiers of the noun phrase. The overwhelming majority of generative grammarians today adopt the DP hypothesis in some form or other.^[3] However, large numbers of both traditional and formal grammarians consider nouns, not determiners, to be the heads of noun phrases.

Determiners govern the referential or quantificational properties of the noun phrases they embed. The idea that noun phrases preceded by determiners are determiner phrases is known as the DP hypothesis. The DP hypothesis goes very well with the theory of generalized quantifiers, which is the prevailing theory of the semantics of determiners.^[4][5]

In some versions of the Minimalist Program the DP is itself the complement of a phase head, n*, from which it inherits the ability to agree with its complement and assign case.^[6]

[edit] References

1. ^ Szabolcsi, A. (1983). The possessor that ran away from home. The Linguistic Review 3.
2. ^ Abney, S. P. (1987). The English Noun Phrase in its Sentential Aspect. Ph. D. thesis, MIT, Cambridge MA.
3. ^ Poole, Geoffrey. Syntactic Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave
4. ^ Montague, Richard: 1974, 'The proper treatment of quantification in English', in R. Montague, Formal Philosophy, ed. by R. Thomason (New Haven).
5. ^ Barwise, Jon and Robin Cooper. 1981. Generalized quantifiers and natural language. Linguistics and Philosophy 4: 159-219.
6. ^ Chomsky, Noam. Approaching UG from Below. Interfaces + Syntax = Language? Chomsky's Minimalism and the View from Syntax-Semantics. ed. Uli Sauerland and Hans-Martin Gärtner, 1-29. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

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