There is room at the bottom for small linguistic stuff

Abstract

This article is concerned with the possibility that syntactic structure may feature “small stuff” not just at the very top of the clause, but also lower down, in the domain that would usually be regarded as the lexical domain. The analysis is based on a range of (dialectal) Dutch and Frisian data, suggesting an initial analysis for the relevant morphosyntactic facts in terms of which a “smaller” higher category - what superficially looks like the definite and indefinite article in the relevant systems - seems to be located at the bottom of a nominal structure.

Keywords

• function word
• article
• root
• extended projection
• categorial identity hypothesis