Specifier

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In X-bar theory in linguistics, specifiers, head words, and complements together form phrases. Specifiers differ from complements because they precede the head and are not subcategorized for. For example, noun phrases can be preceded by words (sometimes phrases) like the, no, some, every, John's and my mother's. Adverbial phrases can be preceded by degree words such as very, extremely, rather and quite.

These specifiers are so called because they further qualify the category of word - in these examples nouns and adverbs - in the phrase.

For example:

  • My friend likes [lots of novels] - lots of specifies novels in this noun phrase
  • She is [quite certain of success] - quite specifies certain in this adverbial phrase

It should be noted that in recent transformational grammar, the term specifier is not normally used to refer to a type of word or phrase, but rather to a structural position provided by X-bar theory or some derivative thereof. In this usage, a phrase (usually a full XP, though in bare phrase structure it could in theory be an intermediate category) is said to occupy the specifier (SpecXP for short) of a head X.

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