The Noun Phrase
Rijkhoff, Jan / Rijkhoff, J.
Jan Rijkhoff investigates noun phrases--linguistic constructions with the noun as central element--in a representative sample of the world's 6000 languages and proposes a semantic model to describe their underlying structure. Assuming no knowledge of any formal or functional theory of grammar, he shows that the noun phrase word order patterns of any language can be derived from three universal ordering principles and furthermore that these pri...