Qualitative binominal noun phrases

This paper tackles the issue of phasehood in qualitative binominal Noun Phrases by proposing an indexically-driven analysis of phases. We will look at phasehood in qualitative binominals, adjectival phrases, and genitives with definiteness agreement, and propose that these three structures meet the criteria of a diagnostic for phasehood in nominals ( Adger 2003 ) in that they all involve single reference. This proposal is in line with work such as Arsenijević (2007) , for whom phases are “units with the capacity to establish one reference relation”, and does so by updating Harley & Ritter (2002) ’s individuation node by adding a branch that contains definiteness, resulting in a node in which individuation is yielded by both φ-features and definiteness. In order to do this, we will use data from Sandəmarkesə, a southern Italo-Romance language spoken on the Gargano promontory in the southern Italian region of Apulia.