The Structure of DPs

This chapter discusses several aspects of the syntax of European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP) noun phrases (NPs). NPs are constructions headed by a noun and, according to the lexical nature of the noun, may contain arguments and modifiers. The chapter starts by examining the argument structure of nouns, mainly those that are deverbal nominalizations. It then presents prepositional phrase (PP) modifiers and possessives with entity/object nouns. The chapter also examines adjectives, their subclasses and positions, and analyzes agreement relations and bare nouns from a syntactic point of view. Modification in nominal expressions may also be made through adjectives. Qualifying adjectives express simple properties of entities, related to dimension, form, color, psychological or physical states. In EP, every element inside the determiner phrase (DP), which is able to inflect for gender and/or number will be morphologically marked as so.