The Left Periphery in the DP from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective

• Applicant: Dr. Viktor Köhlich
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 572978694

This project investigates the high field of the nominal domain, the DP, typically referred to as the left periphery. Discussions in previous literature on this area and its discourse-related nature have not only been rather diverse and mostly based on language-specific analyses, but have also not reached a consensus on which elements we find in this area, and where it begins. This project aims to fill the gaps of this existing literature and to provide an analysis of which elements can appear rather high in the DP and whether these elements always fulfill discourse functions, i.e., whether they are related to information structure, and what these functions could be. Furthermore, the project investigates to what extent cross-linguistic conclusions can be drawn. The investigation will be mainly based on the target languages of this project, Japanese and German, which have been chosen due to their parametric differences, partly addressed in previous literature. This project will not only complement previous analyses and shed light on the left field in those languages, but the results will also lend themselves for an application to other language groups, whether they have been studied with regard to the left periphery (Spanish and Italian) or not. Finally, this project aims to re-evaluate the alleged parallelism between the noun phrase and the clause, especially their extended areas, a long-standing and unresolved issue in linguistics.

• DFG Programme: Position