Editing Determiner phrase (section)

===Parallel structures===

The original motivation for the DP-analysis came in the form of parallelism across phrase and clause. The DP-analysis provides a basis for viewing clauses and phrases as structurally parallel.<ref>Bernstein (2008) develops the point that the DP-analysis increases parallelism across clauses and phrases.</ref> The basic insight runs along the following lines: since clauses have functional categories above lexical categories, noun phrases should do the same. The traditional NP-analysis has the drawback that it positions the determiner, which is often a pure function word, below the lexical noun, which is usually a full content word. The traditional NP-analysis is therefore unlike the analysis of clauses, which positions the functional categories as heads over the lexical categories. The point is illustrated by drawing a parallel to the analysis of auxiliary verbs. Given a combination such as ''will understand'', one views the modal auxiliary verb ''will'', a function word, as head over the main verb ''understand'', a content word. Extending this type of analysis to a phrase like ''the car'', the determiner ''the'', a function word, should be head over ''car'', a content word. In so doing, the NP ''the car'' becomes a DP. The point is illustrated with simple dependency-based hierarchies:

[[File:NP vs. DP 1.1.png|NP vs. DP 1.1|center]]

Only the DP-analysis shown in c establishes the parallelism with the verb chain. It enables one to assume that the architecture of syntactic structure is principled; functional categories (function words) consistently appear above lexical categories (content words) in phrases and clauses. This unity of the architecture of syntactic structure is perhaps the strongest argument in favor of the DP-analysis.