Title: The geometry of the Polish Noun Phrase: Progress and prospects
Speaker: Gilbert Rappaport (University of Texas at Austin)

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The extent to which the clause and the nominal phrase parallel each other
in structure has been a central issue on the agenda of generative grammar
for forty years. The last ten years have seen a burst of further activity
on the question, driven to a considerable extent by the comparative
approach of Giorgi and Longobardi's influential book `The Syntax of Noun
Phrases' (1991) and the contemporaneous proliferation in grammatical theory
of functional categories. The data of Polish and other Slavic languages
have not been neglected, and much insightful work in this area has been
done in both Europe and America.

The derivational excesses of Generative Semantics were rejected in favor of
a lexical approach to derived nominals in Chomsky's 'Remarks on
Nominalization' (1970), which introduced a generalized phrase structure
theory (X-bar theory). Recent work in Minimalism dispenses with X-bar
theory, as well as with the covert movement and Spec-Head agreement which
had been taken to implement case assignment. But is the resulting theory
rich enough to formalize the structural parallels between clause and
nominal phrase, and other properties of the latter? What inventory of
functional categories is appropriate to the nominal phrase? Where is the
line between lexical and syntactic derivation of deverbal nouns, and
between structural and inherent case marking? What is the role of theta
theory? 

This paper will explore these and related questions in order to define the
division of labor among modules of the grammar in the current recension of
Minimalism, with a newly articulated theory of formal features and 'feature
checking' (responsible for case assignment) divorced from movement.