Like all fields of scientific inquiry, generative syntax aims to find an explanation for certain empirical observations; it develops hypotheses to account for them, tests them against more data, evaluates them carefully, and then discards them or refines them. Based on data from Hungarian, Szabolcsi expressed the intuition that noun phrases consist of an NP that is the complement of a functional head. This idea, also independently developed in Abney, has come to be known as the “DP hypothesis.” In this chapter, the author strengthens and refines the DP hypothesis based on evidence from Italian, comparing noun phrases that lack an overt determiner with those that have one. The proposal that argument noun phrases must be DPs raises the issue of how to analyze proper names. In some languages, including Italian, they may be accompanied by a definite article, which has led to viewing them as the head of the NP.
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