The noun phrase was long a neglected area within research in modern syntactic theory. Studies tended to focus instead on the clause and less attention was paid to the internal structure of the noun phrase. The early studies would often take an interest in the properties of noun phrases only in so far as they interacted with clausal morpho-syntax. Nominalisations were then subject to some early studies, as in Chomsky (1970) and work inspired by it.

The standard view concerning Case assignment or valuation is that Case is valued to determiner phrases (DPs) in syntax. Recently, Kayne has proposed an alternative model, in which Case is valued to lexical elements rather than to phrases. This article cites several facts from Finnish in support of this model. A detailed Kaynean model of Case is developed. According to this model, abstract Case is valued to lexical elements by the highest ranking c-commanding Case assigner when each phase (CP, vP) is sealed, where ranking is based on a particular Case Hierarchy and a simple notion of locality. Configurations in which Case is seemingly assigned under a spec–head relation are provided with an alternative interpretation.

The paper describes and discusses a demonstrative that has received little attention in the literature. The demonstrative can be found in many of the Scandinavian languages and dialects, and seems to be most frequent and widespread in the mainland Scandinavian languages. It has the same phonological form as third-person singular pronouns, and can be used only with nouns and have human (or human-like) specific reference. From a deictic perspective, the demonstrative is interesting because its conditions of use are linked to what I call psychological distance. Syntactically, it is also interesting because it has different characteristics in the different languages; in Norwegian and Icelandic it can be argued to be part of the DP, while the empirical facts of Swedish and Danish suggest that the psychologically distal demonstrative is DP-external in these languages.

Pronouns with a demonstrative function appear in most of the Scandinavian languages in phrases like Sjå på han mannen ‘Look at that man’. Despite the Scandinavian languages varying in phrase-internal morphosyntactic definiteness agreement requirements generally, the pronoun demonstrative appears universally with a definite noun (phrase). This is accounted for within a Lexical-Functional Grammar framework, where the pronoun demonstrative is treated as carrying the feature [specific = +], and the definite noun (phrase) is the morphosyntactic realisation of underlying specificity also. In addition, there is variation as to whether the pronoun demonstratives occur as a specifier within the NP, or as the head of its own DP, taking an NP object.

A central objective of this paper is to show how much variation there is across Scandinavian with respect to the morphosyntactic form of interrogative noun phrases. The present paper focuses on three main types of such DPs: (i) phrases involving a cognate of English which, (ii) phrases involving the same element as manner ‘how’ (which is morphologically complex and distinct from degree ‘how’), and (iii) phrases involving ‘what’ with or without an overt kind noun. With respect to all of these different types of noun-phrase-internal wh-expressions an interesting pattern seems to emerge: there are reasons to hold that adnominal wh-expressions start out as modifiers, yielding kind-querying noun phrases, and then develop into determiners, yielding token-querying noun phrases. Although further investigations will have to determine whether such a developmental path (or cycle) is quite general in nature, it can be made perfect sense of with reference to grammaticalization triggered by wh-movement which operates on a DP-structure that distinguishes modification from determination in such a way that the locus of determination is higher than modification.