Determiner phrases

This is really cool. We talked about it in the syntax class last week.

Imagine the phrase "The five dead flies". Since this is english, the word order is "determiner >> numeral >> adjective >> noun". No other sequence is possible. "Flies five dead the", for instance, makes no sense at all. You might have something like "Five of these dead flies", but then the meaning is different, and you have that little "of" there, which you didn't have before.

In a language such as spanish, however, the order is different. You have "determiner >> numeral >> noun >> adjective", that is to say, "Estas cinco moscas muertas". "Determiner >> numeral >> adjective >> noun" is also permissible, but is not the 'original' form. It doesn't always sound well. If you want to test this, ask a native speaker to choose between "Estas cinco moscas muertas" and "Estas cinco muertas moscas". You'll see.

Other languages, such as yoruba, have as their order the exact opposite of english: "noun >> adjective >> numeral >> determiner". They say something like "Flies dead five these".

Now, if you tackle the problem from a mathematical point of view, there are 24 possible orders in which you might arrange these 4 elements (4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24). Yet --and this is the surprising bit-- among the more than 7000 languages spoken now or in the past by human beings, only 14 of these 24 orders are attested.

Furthermore, there's this guy called Guglielmo Cinque who managed to come up with a system by which, departing from one of these orders, you can derive the other valid 13, but not the 10 'wrong' ones. This method is consistent with the rest of syntactic analysis, requires that one starts always from the same, unique 'underlying' order and, what's more, nobody else has been able to come up with any simpler or clearer system that does the same.

This seems to be telling us that only a certain number of operations are possible in the brain with regard to languages. It suggests that language is indeed something that we can learn, but that it can only exist as defined by certain rules and parameters already present within the human brain.

Neat huh?