Ludmila Veselovská (Olomouc): DP Structure in Czech (with special reference to premodification word order)

The paper argues in favour of a universal DP hypothesis in articleless Czech. The data are demonstrated showing the semantic, morphological and syntactic evidence in favour of the existence of a functional domain with a usually covert head above the projection of a lexical Noun. The semantic arguments are based on interpretation and binding facts. The pronominal morphology of the candidates for the lexical entries in the functional domain is compared with the Czech adjectival morphology, showing the distinction between the two. In syntactic domain the distribution and word order restrictions are demonstrated together with the results of corpora search. As for the premodifiers, the study uses the Adjective Hierarchy presented in Scott (2002) and attested also for Russian by Pereltsvaig (2007). It searches for the data in Czech national corpus to demonstrate that the orderings inside Czech nominal complexes are as restricted as those in English and Russian, following the same specific hierarchy. The Czech corpora confirm the distinction between the strict orderings of elements in the functional domain and the more relaxed orderings in the modifier domain. Therefore contrasted with the high periphery of nominal complexes which can be analysed also in Czech as a string of universally ordered syntactic functional heads (hosting Quantifiers, Demonstratives, Possessives and Numerals), the more relaxed adjectival orderings in the prenominal modifier field suggests a semantic hierarchy of syntactic adjuncts.