6 Classifers, articles, and bare nominals 1 Byeong-uk Yi 1 Introduction: The DP hypothesis and bare nominals Most contemporary European languages have defnite and indefnite articles (e.g., ‘the’, ‘a(n)’), and it is usual in modern grammar to take them to belong to a syn- tactic category that includes articles, demonstrative adjectives (e.g., ‘this’, ‘these’), quantifers (e.g., ‘many’), and so on. Bloomfeld distinguishes these expressions from “descriptive adjectives” and calls them “determiners” (1933, 202–206). 2 And Quirk et al., for example, say that (English) determiners are expressions that occur before nouns in noun phrases to determine “the kind of reference” that the phrases have, such as “defnite reference” (e.g., ‘the’) and “indefnite refer- ence” (e.g., ‘a(n)’) (1985, 253). They maintain the traditional view that determin- ers occur as ancillaries to nouns in phrases headed by nouns (i.e., noun phrases). Recently, however, a large group of linguists attribute a central role to them in nominal phrases traditionally considered noun phrase (e.g., ‘the dog’, ‘a dog’). 3 They propose that determiners are heads of such phrases, which must then be properly called determiner phrases (DPs). This thesis is called the Determiner Phrase Hypothesis (or DP hypothesis). 4 Longobardi, for example, holds that the hypothesis follows from Universal Grammar (1994, 641). 5 This view has an obvious problem. On the DP hypothesis, determiners are virtu- ally mandatory in nominal phrases: although they might lack (or appear to lack) determiners, such phrases must be exceptions subject to serious constraints. But a wide variety of languages have no articles 6 and regularly use bare nominals (i.e., nominal phrases without determiners) with defnite and indefnite meanings. While proposing the syntactic category of determiners, Bloomfeld points out that not all languages have the “habit” of marking nominal phrases with determiners: The determiners are defned by the fact that certain types of noun expressions (such as house or big house) are always accompanied by a determiner (as, this house, a big house). . . . This habit of using certain noun expressions always with a determiner, is peculiar to some languages, such as the modern Germanic and Romance. Many languages have not this habit; in Latin, for instance, domus ‘house’ requires no attribute and is used indifferently where [sic, whether] we say the house or a house. (1933, 203)