Language Typology and Syntactic Description: Noun phrase structure

In discussing the structure of noun phrases crosslinguistically, I will assume a rather rough characterization of noun phrases, as syntactic constituents which serve as arguments of verbs. There are a variety of ways in which this is inadequate as a precise definition and there are a number of legitimate questions about exactly what ought to be considered a noun phrase, but these issues are somewhat marginal to the primary purposes of this chapter, which is to discuss some of the ways in which noun phrases differ across languages in a way that will be helpful to someone describing noun phrases in a particular language.