An overview of the NP versus DP debate

This article provides an overview of what is known as the noun phrase (NP) versus determiner phrase (DP) debate. I first revisit the arguments by which a language would be assigned an NP or rather a DP structure, followed by the proper characterisation, function and features of determiners. I then summarise the typological endeavour of Bošković, surveying some of the syntactic and semantic correlates of the NP versus DP parameter and applying four of the diagnostics Bošković developed to Turkish as well as providing examples from other languages such as Korean, Vietnamese and Lithuanian. For each diagnostic, I provide some counterarguments that cast doubt on the validity of those diagnostics. I conclude, in line with Kornfilt (2017, 2018) that proposing correlations between an NP or a DP status of the nominal domain and a certain clustering of syntactic or semantic properties should be abandoned.