Theoretical Comparative Syntax

11   Nominal structure

An extension of the Symmetry Principle

with Yuji Takano

1   Introduction

This article extends the scope of the “Symmetry Principle of Derivation” proposed in our previous work (Fukui and Takano 1998) to the study of the internal structure of noun phrases. The Symmetry Principle dictates that the pre-Spell-Out derivational computations and the post-Spell-Out (pre-Morphology) derivational computations form mirror images of each other. More specifically, we argued in Fukui and Takano (1998) that language computation maps an array of linguistic elements to a PF representation in such a way that it starts with a lexical item (a head) proceeding in a bottom-up fashion (Merge) and at some point of a derivation, starts “decomposing” ...