Adjectives and determiners

• Traditional grammarians treated determiners as adjectives.
• Transformational grammarians argued that determiners belong to DP category.
• Determiners in DP-less languages are argued to be adjectives.
• The data supporting this claim are inconclusive, misrepresented or incorrect.
• The cross-linguistic implications are inconsistent.

Traditional grammar conflates a variety of categories that are distinguished in modern syntactic theory. Items now classified as degree elements (very, extremely, mostly, completely) are assimilated by traditional grammar into the broad class of adverbs. Likewise items now classified as determiners (the, that, a, every, both) are assimilated into the class of adjectives. The distinction between A and D assumes particular importance within recent debates about whether languages might lack the D category – the Parameterized DP-Hypothesis of Fukui (1986), Corver (1992), Zlatić (1997), Baker (2003), Bošković (2005), Despić (2011), among others. This view holds that languages lacking a definite article do not project DP at all, and realize typical determiner elements uniformly within the category of adjective. In this paper I examine data from Serbian, a much discussed candidate for “DP-less” status, looking at the behavior of the relevant elements both with respect to proposed universal diagnostics for adjectivehood and in comparison with neighboring, uncontroversial DP languages (Macedonian, Bulgarian). I show there is no evidence from either source for assuming adjectival status of the relevant items in Serbian. This finding opposes the crucial prediction of the Parameterized DP-Hypothesis. This work is intended to contribute to the existing cross-linguistic discussion on the issues of determiner parameterization ( Bašić, 2004, Pereltsvaig, 2007, Caruso, 2011, Bailyn, 2012 and Pereltsvaig, 2013, i.a.).