| Summary: | In Mexican Spanish, noun phrases introduced by the prenominal adjective puros –roughly equivalent to only– behave like bare nouns, but they also have the distribution of determiner phrases. If it is a determiner, puros is peculiar, because its syntactic complement does not correspond to its semantic restrictor. In other words, it would be a non-conservative determiner, thus violating a semantic universal. In this paper I propose an analysis of puros as an adjectival modifier, and I argue that this analysis can be applied to other expressions that have been identified crosslinguistically as possible non-conservative determiners.
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