The Noun Phrase (review)

Rijkhoff’s book is an in-depth typological investigation of the syntax and semantics of the noun phrase in the functional grammar framework. It provides a crosslinguistic account of the constituents that form the noun phrase, presents a typologically adequate model of the NP in the general framework of functional grammar, and explores NP-internal word order patterns in the languages of the world.

The study is based on data from a sample of fifty-two languages, on the basis of a sampling method developed by the author and described in Ch. 1. The rest of this chapter contains a preliminary discussion of the category ‘noun’ and a classification of world languages into those without a major category noun, those with nouns nondistinguished from other lexical categories, and those with a distinct class of nouns.

Ch. 2 is about nominal subcategories. R argues on the basis of morphosyntactic evidence that there are four sub types of nouns that are used to refer to a discrete entity in the world (like ‘knife’): singular object nouns, set nouns, sort nouns, and general nouns. This categorization is based on a set of two binary features: ‘shape’ and ‘homogeneity’. The chapter ends with the proposal that the nominal domain establishes a ‘Seinsart’ (mode of being) in a parallel fashion to the clausal ‘Actionsart’ (mode of action).

Ch. 3 presents a further investigation of the interaction between noun subclasses and the expression of linguistic structures. Real and apparent nouns interact differently with constituents outside the nominal domain such as sentence predicates, adpositions, and case affixes, and influence the form and order of constituents internal to the noun phrase. R distinguishes between noun classifiers and noun classes and examines the latter under a number of semantic features including ‘human’ and ‘animate’.

Chs. 4, 5, and 6 investigate the properties of modifiers of nouns characterized in terms of the notions ‘quality’, ‘quantity’, and ‘locality’. Ch. 4 is concerned with the notion of quality and investigates the distribution of adjectives as well as elements of the new grammatical category of ‘nominal aspect markers’, which specify a qualitative property of the referent. R proposes an implicational universal, which states that a language can have adjectives only if it employs singular objects and set nouns. Ch. 5 concerns the constituents of the NP that specify quantitative purposes of the referent: number markers and numerals. Ch. 6 investigates the notion of locality. Localizing operators and localizing satellites are related to locative properties of the referent of the NP. The former type includes demonstratives and articles, while the latter contains relative clauses, possessive modifiers, and locative modifiers.

Ch. 7 presents a new underlying structure for noun phrases in the grammatical framework of functional grammar. This structure is shown to consist of three hierarchically nested layers, each of which accommodates grammatical and lexical instances of the notions quality, quantity, and location. The clause, or ‘predication’ in functional grammar terms, is analyzed in the same fashion, achieving a parallelism between the nominal and clausal domains.

The following three chapters are concerned with the internal syntax of noun phrases and in particular with the order of constituents in the noun phrase. In Ch. 8, the principle of ‘domain integrity’ replaces the notions of constituency and dependency of other grammatical frameworks, as R assumes that the preferred position of embedded domains is in the periphery of the matrix domain. A second principle of ‘head proximity’ is introduced in Ch. 9, which restricts the distribution of modifying adjectives to positions immediately before or after the head noun depending on the basic word order properties of each language. Finally, Ch. 10 introduces the ‘principle of scope’, which places modifiers next to elements that are in their scope. The last chapter of the book is a summary of the previous chapters and is followed by a list of references, a subject index, a language index, and an author index.

The volume is a valuable source of typological data related to the noun phrase and is recommended for everyone that...