Author: Sadler, Louisa Date: August 15 1998 Title: Welsh NPs without Head Movement Abstract: The Celtic languages are strongly configurational, exhibiting a highly hierarchical structural (external) syntax. Typologically, they show the salient characteristics of head initial languages and in particular, the finite verb is clause initial (non-finite clauses, on the other hand, show subject-predicate or DP VP structure). If, as is standard, the sentence is identified with IP or CP, this suggests that the finite verb occupies I, a situation which is often modelled derivationally by head movement (of V to I or C). In Welsh, nominal structure is largely parallel to clausal structure: in particular, very few elements can occur prenominally within noun phrases. The head noun precedes most adjectival modifiers, all complements, PP adjuncts and the possessive specifier. Noun phrase word order poses two interesting challenges for standard assumptions about phrasal structure in configurational languages: (i) (the majority of) adjectives intervene between the head noun and its (putative) complements and (ii) the possessive phrase (putatively a structural specifier) appears between the head noun and its complements (and after any AP modifiers). That is, the linear order is N (AP*) (possessor) (complements). Any analysis of noun phrase structure must also take into account a number of further aspects: (iii) pronominal possessors appear as prenominal clitics; (iv) a head noun cannot take both a possessive and a definite article and (v) a limited set of elements may appear in prenominal position. Several authors have proposed head movement accounts of Celtic noun phrase structure, in which the substantive categorial head N raises to a dominating functional head position (variously Num, Agr and D) in order to account for the observed linear order of elements. On this view, NS(poss)O(complement) structure in noun phrases is derived in a fashion similar to VSO clausal structure, namely by head movement to a functional category position. Despite the initial attraction of this analysis, we argue in this paper that it is fundamentally misguided. One major objection is conceptual in nature: N raising must apply in a totally general fashion to all N: it is not restricted to a specialised (morphologically identifiable) subcategory of nouns, or correlated with any specific functional property. It is simply not clear what is functional (in the appropriate sense) about nouns. A further objection is empirical in nature: the N raising account runs into a number of empirical difficulties when a wider range of data is considered. This paper presents an alternative analysis within the lexicalist framework of Bresnan's (forthcoming) Lexical Functional Syntax and shows how this can account for the properties (i) - (v). Our analysis builds on the approach to NPs previously sketched in Sadler (LFG97) and provides further motivation for the notion of small syntactic constructions.