Elucidating Nominal Structure in Articleless Languages: A Case Study of Tatar

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:The central question addressed by this paper is whether languages without articles have the same highly articulated functional architecture in noun phrases, including the DP projection. Pereltsvaig (2006, 2007, 2013) argued that while some nominals in Russian and other articleless Slavic languages are DPs, others are Small Nominals (SNs) of different sizes. In this paper, we provide novel evidence for this position based on another Turkic language, Tatar (spoken by over 5 million in Tatarstan, Russia). Drawing on our fieldwork on one sub-dialect of Tatar (spoken in the village of Kutlushkino), we show that different syntactic constructions call for nominals of different sizes.