| This thesis investigates the nature of determiners (mostly) in Germanic, with an emphasis on Swiss German. It is argued that determiners (other than the articles) are internally complex and composed in the syntax (cf. Vangsnes 2008). The structural makeup and derivational patterns of a given determiner are not idiosyncratic to that determiner but, it was found, are shared across different determiners and across languages. Furthermore, determiners are not a species of their own, but are instances of (specialized) extended adjectival projections, which, in turn, are argued to involve a relativization structure (cf. Smith 1961, Kayne 1994). It was further found that sometimes, elements that are structurally present fail to receive a phonetic realization (cf. Kayne 2005). And furthermore it was found that there are sequences of morphemes that are perceived as forming a unit (a "word'') that do not form a constituent in the syntax (cf. Julien 2002). From a larger perspective, the main finding of this study is that elements which have traditional been taken to be "function words,'' i.e. syntactically atomic, have an elaborate internal structure which, at least in part, is syntactic. |
