It is well-known that DET-categories (DET=articles, demonstratives, quantifiers, etc.) are obligatory in most complex nominals headed by singular count nouns in languages like English, German, Italian and the like, cf. Stowell (1991), Longobardi (1994). DET-obligatoriness in these languages famously contrasts with the optionality of DET-categories in complex nominals of many Slavic languages (Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish and the like). Such contrasts have been argued to be derivable from an NP-DP-parameter (Bošković 2005, 2008 /et seq/). Following work by Uriagereka (1988) and Corver (1989), Bošković argues that this parameter also underlies the availability of DET-extraction and the absence thereof: Thus, a subset of NP-languages allow Left Branch Extraction, while DP-languages are subject to an island constraint, the Left Branch Condition (cf. Ross 1986). I suggest replacing the NP-DP-divide with a lexical parameter of the functional nominalizing head /n/ (cf. Borer 2005). Adopting labeling theory (Chomsky 2013, 2015), I argue that the mentioned pattern of obligatory/optional External Merge and (dis-)allowed Internal Merge of DET-categories is deducible in a uniform fashion from a single property of the nominal categorizer: English, German and Italian feature "weak" /n/, while the mentioned Slavic languages feature "strong" /n/. This lexical difference correlates with the manifestation of morphological case on the nouns in these languages.