ИСТИНА

The paper contributes to the elaboration of the problem of intra-linguistic and cross-linguistic variation in the syntactic structure of nominals. I start by introducing the DP-hypothesis, which was first proposed for languages with articles, such as English and Hungarian. It states that nominals in these languages are not phrases headed by the lexical noun, but phrases headed by the determiner, and the latter takes the lexical NP as its complement. Then I proceed to the problem of the universality of DP and make an overview of argumentation both pro and contra postulating a layered structure of nominals in article-less languages. After that, I present a case study of differential object marking (DOM) in Tatar, an article-less Turkic language spoken in Russia. I show that a comprehensive analysis of DOM in Tatar necessitates a complex internal structure of nominals.