Abstract

This paper discusses a historical change in the grammar of English Noun Phrases with a special focus on the cooccurrence restricti on of Determiners and possessive Noun Phrases.
It is known that (early)Modern English allowed a collocation like, “this your picture”, which is ungrammatical in Present-day English. If this fact is to be explained in structural terms only, the grammar requires a major change of the specifier system of English Noun Phrases between these two adjacent periods, which suggests that the language experienced a shift from a multispecifier language to a uni-specifier language.
The main a rgument of this paper is that there occurred no significant structural change in English Noun Phrases between the periods discussed. An analysis, using the Determiner Phrase hypothesis in Government-Binding framework, reveals that a historical change of one indexing rule, which is concerned with the Empty Category Principle, has created a deceptive contrast regarding the structure of English Noun Phrases in the two periods discussed. The final portion of the paper provides some independent motivation for the proposal.