Demonstratives, possessives, and quantifier expressions in articleless Russian

There is an ongoing debate in the literature as to whether there is a D-projection for NPs in languages without overt articles. Bošković (2005, 2007, 2009, 2010) claims that there are no determiners in articleless Slavic languages.  Pereltsvaig (2007) and many others argue against this claim for Russian. Pereltsvaig assumes that Russian NPs have a DP projection and that demonstratives and possessives are D-level elements in Russian. The contribution of this paper is twofold: I will provide evidence that demonstratives and prenominal possessives in Russian are adjectives, not determiners, and that they occur within NP. However, these facts do not refute the hypothesis that there are functional projections in Russian, at least for some NPs. I will show that Russian has a non-adjectival grammatical expression – každyj ‘every’ – that semantically and syntactically behaves like a quantifier and plausibly occurs in some functional projection above NP level. Whether this is a D-position and whether a D-projection is necessary for Russian nominal expressions remain open questions.