Eastern Tamang and the NP/DP Macroparameter

This paper deals with a series of papers by Bošković, who proposes a macroparameter to distinguish between DP languages (or article languages) and NP languages (or articleless languages). This NP/DP Macroparameter has garnered significant attention giving rise to much cross-linguistic research on nominals. Nevertheless, macroparameters have not fared well in recent years, and the NP/DP macroparameter also has problems, as we discussed. We evaluate the diagnostics for this macroparameter with data from Eastern Tamang, a dialect of Tamang, a Sino-Tibetan language. We show that the vast majority of the diagnostics fail to indicate the nominal structure of Eastern Tamang, and the few that do give rise to contradictory results. We discuss some problems with the diagnostics and give some tentative suggestions as to how the NP/DP Macroparameter might dissolve into various microparameters, thereby accounting for at least some of the contradictory results uncovered in Eastern Tamang and in other languages.