A somewhat more useful way is to do what snailboat suggests above,
namely ignore the DP
Hypothesis, which is after all just a hypothesis that can't be disproved,
and go for something that represents the data rather than the theory.
For instance, McCawley 1998 distinguishes between two types of nouny constituent in English:
Nʹ
(pronounced "N-Bar" -- don't ask), which is a phrasal unit headed by an N
and
NP
(pronounced "N-P"), which is the syntactic constituent type
corresponding to the logical type Argument of Predicate
(and thus is outside the X-Bar nodal system).
For instance, it's not clear that the subject of
- That he arrived late is very unfortunate.
(i.e, the complement clause that he arrived late,
which must be a noun phrase since it's the subject),
can be said even to have a head, and if so, it's clearly not headed by a noun.
It's simply an NP, since it corresponds to an argument of the predicate adjective unfortunate.
The constituent containing determiners that precedes prenominal adjectives
is then simply, in X-Bar terminology, a Dʹ
. In general, an NP
will contain a Dʹ
.
For instance, the subject of the following sentence
- Quite a few of the more than ten thousand people took his advice.
would be parsable as [NP
[Dʹ
Quite ... thousand Dʹ
] [N people N] NP].
Whether Dʹ
is actually the same constituent type as DP
depends entirely on one's preferred nomenclatural presuppositions.
It doesn't bear on descriptions of phenomena, except to counsel one
to avoid confusing modes of expression; after all, the idea is to be clear.