Abstract
Since the influential work of Abney (1987), the nominal projection has been assumed to be headed by D taking NP s as its complement. This paper raises an objection to the claim that the NP/DP distinction in noun phrases corresponds to the predicate/argument distinction (Abney 1987, Stowell 1991, Longobardi 1994). I claim with reference to earlier English and Present-day Japanese that both lexical and functional expressions can denote argumenthood, and that only functionally determined referential expressions are “closed”, thus not allowing a further modification by a determiner.
