Cooccurrence of nonarticle determiners as evidence for split DPs and bundled projections

This research report examines crosslinguistic variation in cooccurrence among nonarticle determiners (demonstratives, proper names, pronouns, possessors) and its implications for understanding nominal (DP) structure and its variation. We present data from several language families and show that languages vary in both the number and permitted combinations of nonarticle determiners within a nominal phrase. These patterns provide new evidence that the primary semantic components of nominal reference—person, deixis, and inclusiveness—correspond to syntactic features in a universal hierarchy. Languages vary in how these features are bundled on functional heads; nonarticle determiners can cooccur only if their corresponding features are on separate heads.