| This dissertation explores a minimal/universal set of functional projections which are involved in building nominal and adjectival expressions. It presents several case studies of nominal and adjectival expressions such as verbal noun constructions, numeral classifier constructions, plural expressions, and comparative constructions, based on the assumption of the highly impoverished lexicon, whereby properties of grammatical structures, typically having been assumed to be associated with lexical items, are reduced to general syntactic considerations; no lexical specifications with respect to the distinction between referential and event nominals, the distinction between mass and count nouns, and the distinction between gradable and non-gradable adjectives are argued to be required in the lexicon, and instead they are attributed to the properties of syntactic derivations involving the presence or the absence of VP, C1P, and GP respectively.;Verbal nouns are claimed to be verbs and the constructions are analyzed by appealing to the general theory of derived nominals and gerunds (Chapter 2). Numeral classifier constructions are proposed to have the DP structure embedding a small clause inside it (Chapter 3). Plurality in classifier languages is attempted to be explained in relation with distributivity (Chapter 4). Comparatives in Korean are shown to involve degree operator movement and three types of comparatives such as CP, small clause, and measure phrase DegP comparatives are identified (Chapter 5 and 6).;Based on those case studies, the sets of functional projections responsible for forming nominal and adjectival phrases are identified: C1P, ;All the analyses proposed in this dissertation point to a minimalistic view of parametric variations; semantics of bare lexical items are same across languages: all nouns, by default, being mass nouns and all adjectives being non-gradable adjectives across languages, interpretations associated with functional categories are uniform and their functional hierarchy in the grammar is also uniform. The differences, then, reduce down to their distinct way of realizing the functional nodes morpho-phonologically. |
