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I propose a phrasal-movement analysis of word order in Hebrew and Arabic noun phrases. I argue that the positioning of nominal modifiers with respect to the head of simple nouns cannot be adequately handled by an N-raising derivation. This is so because nouns fail to move as heads in the grammars of Hebrew and Arabic. The only heads that seem to be able to move are those which do not assign genitive case. When modifiers (adjectives, numerals, demonstratives, etc.) appear to the right of the noun, it is the noun phrase itself which has raised to the left of the modifier, moving from specifier to specifier and pied piping all the material on its right. In this manner, inverse or mirror image ordering of post-nominal material is accounted for. Some modifiers have the option of appearing pre-nominally as well as post-nominally. I argue that these elements can be merged either as heads governing their complement and assigning genitive case to their sister or to the specifier of their sister, or as specifiers of projections containing a phonetically null head. In the former case, the modifier's sister is frozen in position, being licensed by genitive case. In the latter case, XP-movement of the sister of the null head is triggered, and agreement or concord is manifested on the modifier. I develop a configurational theory of agreement, which accounts for these phenomena. Many of the signature properties of the Semitic Construct-state fall out from the phrasal movement analysis. Finally, action nominalizations are dealt with. I provide arguments for a syntactic derivation in which a VP is associated with a nominalizing head configured in the clausal hierarchy as a functional head. I show that the position of the nominalizing head is above certain aspectual projections and lower than others. This explains why some adverbials, but not others, may occur inside a derived nominal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the introduction of the X-bar principles in syntax it is commonly assumed that adpositions are complement-taking heads of PPs. While this treatment is well motivated for many adpositions in many languages, there are some which – in some of their uses – would be better treated as nonhead daughters of verbal or nominal projections. These exceptional adpositions, which I will henceforth call 'minor', are the central topic of the article: I will provide criteria for their identification, propose a detailed treatment of the constructions which contain them, and address the question of whether they form a natural class. The wider significance of the analysis consists in the evidence which it provides against the wide-spread practice of treating function words as heads of phrasal projections. This practice, which is mainly associated with Chomsky (1986) and which has led to the postulation of a plethora of functional projections, including CP, DetP, and InflP, is not well suited to a treatment of the minor adpositions and should be replaced with an alternative in which these adpositions are treated as functor daughters in verbal or nominal projections. The analysis draws on various types of descriptive and formal grammar, as well as on corpus-based research, but the format in which it is cast is the constraint-based lexicalist one of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar; see Pollard and Sag (1994). A brief introduction to the HPSG notation is provided in section 2.2. The exemplification will be based on Dutch, but at various points comparisons will be made with English and German. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]