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This chapter presents detailed empirical work on several aspects of children's linguistic performance, focusing in particular on evidence that even two-year-old children understand that the meanings of determiners are ‘conservative’, that the meaning of natural language disjunction is ‘inclusive–or’, and that the structural notion of ‘c-command’ governs a range of linguistic phenomena. This and other works are used to defend three related versions of the argument from the poverty of the stimulus, each of which strongly supports the existence of an innate language faculty.

This chapter looks at the use and syntax of the genitive case in Old English. It forms the basis for the discussion of the changes examined in the remaining chapters. Particular attention is paid to arguments that possessives were not definite in Old English and that Old English lacked a category of determiners. It is established that the postnominal position of the genitive was less frequent in the Old English stage than the prenominal position, demonstrating the inadequacy of the widely held view that the deterioration of case marking in English was responsible for the loss of the postnominal genitive.

This chapter examines combinations of determiners and possessives in earlier English. While the combination determiner + possessive is well attested in other Germanic languages, the combination possessor and determiner is rarer and has received scant attention. Arguments for the non-definiteness of possessives based on their co-occurrence with determiners are dismissed.

In principle, Conjunctivists can treat determiners, like ‘every’, as predicates satisfied by ordered pairs of sets. But this recapitulates standard Functionist accounts, which fail to explain various constraints on determiner meanings. A better option is to allow for plural predicates, which can be satisfied by some things without being satisfied by any one of those things, and say that determiners are plural predicates satisfied by ordered pairs consisting of an entity and a truth value. Spelling out the details requires a discussion of second-order variables, but this is required in any case. The net result is a relatively simple Conjunctivist account that explains the conservativity of determiners, while retaining the descriptive adequacy of generalized quantifier theories. The proposal, which dovetails with the idea that determiner phrases often raise, extends smoothly to an account of plural noun phrases that also avoids some undesirable implications of Functionist approaches, which invoke quantification over collections. A moral is that predicates can have many values relative to any assignment of values to variables, and that associating each predicate with a single set-like value is a distortion.

This chapter discusses comparative syntax and the parameters underlying some very fine-grained differences (in the area of quantity words) between English and French. One type of parameter proposed involves the choice between pronouncing and leaving silent a particular functional element. Comparative syntax necessarily involves work on more than one language, but it is not that simple. On the one hand, it attempts to characterize and delineate the parameters that ultimately underlie cross-linguistic differences in syntax. On the other hand, it attempts to exploit those differences as a new and often exciting source of evidence bearing on the characterization and delineation of the principles of universal grammar, of the properties that, by virtue of holding of the (syntactic component of the) human language faculty, will be found to hold of every human language.

This chapter examines the question of prepositions, pursuing the argument in favor of an above-verb phrase (VP) source for some of them. Certain quantifier movements must then be reanalyzed as instances of remnant movement, as had been suggested for some cases in earlier work by Antonia Androutsopoulou and Michal Starke. This chapter contains, in addition, an extended argument in favor of the presence of unpronounced elements such as AMOUNT and NUMBER and MUCH and MANY, in French and in English. In conclusion, many instances of French de (“of”) and English of that look determiner phrase (DP)-internal can be reanalyzed as being VP-external. What looks like movement of bare “quantifiers” such as peu (“few”/“little”) turns out to be remnant movement. In many cases there is reason to postulate the presence of an unpronounced AMOUNT or NUMBER or an unpronounced MUCH or MANY, both in French and in English.

This chapter explores unpronounced elements in the context of a discussion of the English words few, little, many, much, and numerous. As is well known, few has regular comparative and superlative forms that make it natural to take the word as an adjective. Given this, the general parallelism between few and little, many, and much, combined with the more specific fact that they, too, have comparative and superlative forms, leads to the natural conclusion that little, many, and much are also adjectives. In the phrases many booksor few books, many and few are presumed to modify NUMBER rather than directly modifying books. This claim can be elevated to a claim about universal grammar (UG): in all languages, modifiers with the interpretation of many or few necessarily modify NUMBER (or number).

This chapter turns to the motivation for one more functional open value within the nominal domain: Classifier Phrase (CL^max), headed by the open value DIV (div. meaning ‘division’). It is argued that CL^max is responsible for the generation of mass vs. count structures and is assigned range, in English, both by plural inflection and by the indefinite article a. #P, on the other hand, is the merger location of all other determiners, including strong determiners, weak determiners, cardinals, and the definite article as well. The chapter looks at the mass-count distinction and the singular-plural distinction in a number of languages, particularly English and Chinese. It also discusses the affinity between bare mass nouns and bare plurals when contrasted with singulars, and provides for a typology of determiners across languages. As in the case of proper vs. common names, it is argued that no lexical listing is required to distinguish mass nouns from count nouns, and that, as in the case of proper/common names, the distinction is fundamentally structural, rather than lexico-semantic.

This chapter argues that the properties of the Quantity Phrase (#P) in conjunction with the properties of DP are responsible for derivation of strong vs. weak readings for quantifiers, cardinals, and indefinites. In lieu of an operation of type-shifting, the key element in deriving distinct types involves the assignment of range by the same determiner to _#, the value heading #P, and to _d, the value heading DP.

This chapter investigates the properties of the Modern Hebrew (henceforth Hebrew) singular in its different indefinite and definite instantiations. It is here that much of this variation is best illustrated. The investigation of the singular will further serve as a springboard to discussing the properties of Hebrew cardinal determiners in general, the status of specifier cardinals vs. head cardinals, and the interaction, in Hebrew, between the assignment of range to _d and to _#.

This chapter discusses the local and global properties of English quantifiers. The local properties of English quantifiers include the noun property, the three semantic classes of determiners (Dets), generalizing Dets and Determiner Phrases (DPs), and non‐logical Dets. The global properties of English quantifiers include global logicality and first‐order definability.

This chapter brings together and extends various observations on the functions of names and their relation to other categories. Names as arguments are definite and serve independently to establish the identity of a referent; this capacity they share with deictics. Names also occur in nominations or naming expressions, where they are not definite, and in vocatives, where they are again not obviously definite but confer a label on the addressee. The distinctions between names and pronouns are discussed, as well as the similarities and differences between names and generic expressions. Names emerge as functionally and distributionally distinct from all of these. The relationship between these various categories is conceptualized as what is termed a ‘cycle of individualization’, in which names are basic.

The traditional account of the analytic/synthetic distinction is based on a naive folk theory of language. This chapter explains how that folk theory supported a particular version of the analytic/synthetic distinction. It then provides alternatives to the folk picture and argues that we should distinguish four different kinds of meaning: character, content, reference determiner, and referent. This more fine-grained picture allows us to reconstruct analyticity as truth in virtue of reference determiner, which is more easily defended against the old arguments against analyticity. This move also solves the worry about equating analytic sentences with those that express necessary truths, and allows us to account for the status of the contingent analytic and the necessary a posteriori.

A final problem left over from the previous chapter is that of substantive necessity. How are we to distinguish substantively necessary sentences from analytic ones? This problem arises because we have attempted to characterise analyticity in modal terms. This chapter proposes a more fine-grained ‘metaphysical picture’ of analyticity to underlie the rougher modal approximation developed in Chapter 2.

This chapter responds to the two main arguments of Quine's paper ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’. It argues that Chapter 2's rejection of the language myth makes it easier to understand what is good or plausible in the infamous argument from circularity, but that it ultimately also allows us to reject the conclusion of that argument. Similarly, the argument from confirmation holism is presented and rejected.

Definitions have often thought to be crucial to the debate over the analytic/synthetic distinction. They have seemed to provide clear examples of synonymy which are well-entrenched in scientific and mathematical practice. This chapter re-examines the properties of definitions in the light of our rejection of the Language Myth. The resulting account allows us both to explain Quine's sometimes puzzling views on definition, and to defend the analytic/synthetic distinction against his doctrine of the transience of definition.

This chapter argues that Cinque's (2005) result concerning the noun phrase internal order of demonstrative, numeral, adjective, and noun can be derived with- appeal to Kayne's (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom. It claims that a theory which allows branching to the left and to the right but restricts (at least certain kinds of) movement to the left has a better chance of explaining universal word-order asymmetries than theories based on the Linear Correspondence Axiom, because these necessarily invoke movement in an unconstrained way.

This chapter analyses zhe in archaic Chinese as a determiner which selects a nominal or clausal complement and projects a DP. As a determiner, zhe can further serve as the external binder of a gap in its complement, thereby creating a relative clause. Consequently, this analysis offers s a unified account of the seemingly heterogeneous behaviour of zhe as nominalizer, relativizer, or topic marker.