Demonstratives, word orders and the DP between syntax and semantics.

The contribution discusses some instances of internal word order variation in nominal structures (DPs) with specific attention to the position of demonstrative elements, and will propose an attempt of a crosslinguistic analysis in a parametric perspective. Focusing on relevant empirical data collected on purpose, I will explore the hypothesis that both cross- and intra-linguistic surface differences in the position of demonstratives depend in fact on the interaction of a set of abstract properties which define the syntactic configuration of the DP with a cluster of semantic features which are directly associated to such a configuration. I adopt the universal structure of the nominal domain sketched within the framework of the ‘DP hypothesis’ (e.g. Bernstein 2001, Longobardi 2001).