Tashlhiyt Berber DP Assembled

The DP hypothesis (cf. Abney. The English noun phrase in its sentential aspects. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT, 1987), whereby noun phrases (NPs) are claimed to actually be determiner phrases (DPs), has generated much disagreement in literature. Some researchers took the hypothesis for granted: Longobardi (Linguist Inq 25(4):609–665, 1994), Cinque (On the evidence for partial N-movement in the Romance DP. In: Cinque G, Koster J, Pollock J-Y, Rizzi L, Zanuttini R (eds) Paths towards universal grammar: study in honor of Richard S. Kayne. Georgetown University Press, Washington, pp 85–110, 1994), and Progovac (J Linguist 34:165–179, 1998). Others have stood against it: Lyons (Definiteness. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999), Bošković (Left branch extraction, structure of NP, and scrambling. In: Sabel J, Saito M (eds) The free word order phenomenon: its syntactic sources and diversity. Mouton, Berlin, pp 13–73, 2005; What will you have, DP or NP? In: E. Elfner, M. Walkow (eds) Proceedings of the Northeastern Linguistics Society (NELS) 37. GSLA Publications, Amherst, pp 101–114, 2008). The present work provides an in-depth reconsideration of the nominal construction in Tashlhiyt Berber. I argue that DP projects in the syntax of the language. I present ample empirical arguments that support N merger with little n, and with D0. The proposed analysis proves to be useful in understanding most of the concealed aspects of the noun and its interaction with pre- and post-nominal modifiers.