In Defense of DP (or KP)

Bruening et al. (2018) present a reanalysis of the DP Hypothesis, arguing that nominal phrases are NPs and that functional elements such as number and determiners appear in the specifier of NP. We take issue with a number of their claims, arguing that the DP Hypothesis (re-named here as the DP/KP Hypothesis) is in fact not in jeopardy. We review their discussion and present our counter arguments. First, we address their discussion of the development of the DP Hypothesis, and include several critical references they did not include in their overview. Their claim that the DP Hypothesis largely rests on an architectural parallel with the extended verbal projection ignores a large body of literature in which morphological, syntactic, and semantic evidence is adduced for an articulated nominal structure. They discuss several lines of evidence based on selection in support of their claim that nominal phrases are headed by N. We show that their claims fail for empirical and theoretical reasons. Specifically, once the assumption of another layer of structure above DP (namely KP) is acknowledged, their arguments against the functional architecture in nominal phrases no longer hold. We conclude that the DP/KP Hypothesis is still the best explanation for the cross-linguistic facts on nominal phrases.