The ‘Noun Phrase’ across Languages

Maa (sometimes referred to as Maasai) discourse and syntax largely require determined phrases. NP is not a robust construction in Maa, partly because ‘noun’ is not highly distinguished morphosyntactically from ‘adjective.’ Either can be a syntactic argument just if preceded by a determiner; ‘ablity to serve as an argument’ does not correspond to a lexical N or NP category. The paper proposes a definition of ‘determiner’, which includes Maa demonstratives and gender+number proclitics. The latter