grammatical foundations

The Internal Structure of the DP

determiner has no uncontracted form and so we never see it occupying the D position. We thus have the following analysis:

DP D©

contraction ’s book

If this analysis can be maintained, we now know why possessors and determiners are in complementary distribution; in fact they are not in complementary distribution but the possessive determiner ‘’s’ is in complementary distribution with other determiners, as we would expect.

There is one drawback to this analysis however, which concerns pronoun possessors:

(51)a his idea

b my mother

Presumably as these pronouns have the same function as possessors, they sit in the same position: specifier of the DP:

DP D©

idea

Note that these pronouns have a special genitive form, which demonstrates that this position is one to which genitive Case is assigned. Thus, even if the ‘’s’ morpheme is not the marker of genitive Case, DPs which sit in the specifier of a DP have this Case. The problem is that with pronoun possessors the possessive determiner (the ‘’s’ morpheme) does not appear. This is rather puzzling, especially if this morpheme is nothing to do with genitive Case.

There are a number of possible solutions we might suppose. One is to assume that the possessive determiner is present with pronoun possessors, but remains unpronounced. This is supported by the fact that, as with all other possessors, no other determiner can appear with a pronoun possessor:

(53)a *my the house

b *her a travel permit

If nothing is in the determiner position, these observations would be hard to account for. We then have to assume that for some reason when the possessor is a pronoun, the possessive determiner is unpronounced and when it is a non-pronoun it gets

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pronounced as ‘’s’. As far as I know there is no explanation as to why this should be and so it remains as a descriptive statement at present.

An alternative would be to claim that the possessive determiner is always unpronounced and hence that the ‘’s’ morpheme is not a realisation of this determiner at all. Instead it is a marker of possession, which pronouns do not need as they have a genitive form to demonstrate their status as possessors. The problem with this is that it is tantamount to claiming that the ‘’s’ morpheme really is a Case morpheme after all, despite it not behaving like one.

A third possibility would be to claim that the reason why pronoun possessor are in complementary distribution with all other determiners, including the possessive determiner, is because they are determiners sitting in the head position. From this perspective, the structure of the DP with a possessive pronoun would be:

D©

D NP

your idea

This solves all the previous distribution problems, but places the pronominal possessor in a different structural position to all other possessors, which makes their similar interpretations difficult to account for. Moreover, (54) is not likely to be the correct analysis for semantic reasons. The reference of the possessor is obviously different to the reference of the whole DP: the pronoun refers to a person (i.e. you) whereas the DP refers to a mistake. But if the pronoun is the head of the DP, how could it have a reference that differed from the DP? It seems that there is no perfect solution to these problems from our present understanding of the internal organisation of the DP and we will therefore have to wait for further developments to make progress in this matter.

2.3Adjunction within the DP

Adjunction within the DP itself is a rather limited phenomenon. We know that APs and PPs act as modifiers of nouns and adjoin within the NP, but these do not adjoin within the DP ever as can be seen by the fact that they never precede determiners or never modify pronouns:

Certain adverbs may precede determiners and hence might be analysed as DP adjuncts:

(56)a not the right answer b only a fool

However, it is not at all clear that these elements form part of the DP at all as their distribution is more limited than we would expect if they were inside the DP:

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(57)a this is not the right answer b *not the right answer is 42

(58)a only a fool would think that b *I met only a fool

These observations would be consistent with the idea that these modifiers are not part of the DP at all, but occupy separate positions in the sentence.

There are some cases of modification by an adverb, however, that do seem to behave as though the adverb is part of the DP. This mainly takes place with quantificational determiners, the meaning of which is modified by the adverb:

(59)a almost all men have two legs and one head b I like almost all Renaissance paintings

It seems that such adverbs are adjoined at the DP level, rather than at the D©level as can be seen from the fact that they precede possessives:

(60)a almost John’s whole life was spent avoiding work b *his almost whole life …

Thus, we propose the following analysis for these structures:

AP DP

nearly D©

D NP

3 Multiple Determiners

In the last part of this chapter we will consider structures which appear to have more than one determiner. In fact English seems to allow for up to three determiners:

(62)all the many disappointments

Traditionally, the determiner which appears in the middle is called a Central Determiner, the one in front a Pre-determiner and the one following a Postdeterminer. One might think that an appropriate analysis for this kind of structure would be as follows:

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many disappointments

Unfortunately however this fails to capture some rather basic facts about multiple determiners and it also complicates the theory of heads to some extent. The first problem is obvious: if a determiner like the can take a DP as its complement, why can it not take any DP complement? The only ‘DP’ that can follow this determiner is one headed by a post-determiner:

(64)a the few good ideas b *the all men

c *the this mistake

In general then, the structure in (63) predicts that determiners can come in any order within the DP and moreover there can be any number of them. Neither of these expectations is true. The second problem lies in the fact that this suggestion forces us to accept that determiners do not just take NP complements; they can take DP complements as well. We will see in later chapters that it is very typical of functional heads to take just one kind of complement, and no functional head takes a DP complement. DP complements seem to be restricted to thematic heads and so it is unlikely that a determiner should be able to take one.

So what is the proper analysis of multiple determiners? The easiest case to deal with is the post-determiner. We argued in chapter 1 that these are adjectival elements which are undefined for the F feature and hence are neither functional nor thematic adjectives. The fact that they may be modified in the same way as thematic adjectives, however, indicates that they head APs:

(65)a his [AP very few] good ideas

b my [AP not so many] disastrous parties

We can see from this that the traditional term ‘post-determiner’ is a rather misleading one as they are not determiners, nor even heads but whole adjectival phrases. Where is this AP situated? Clearly it follows the determiner and what follows the head is its complement. But determiners do not take AP, but NP complements. It must therefore be the case that post-determiners occupy a position within the NP complement of the

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determiner, the specifier position of the NP complement. Thus, we have the following structure:

D©

D NP

many N

analyses

This leaves the pre-determiners to accommodate. These are more problematic. However, it turns out that pre-determiners are not such a special class of determiner after all, once one considers the following:

(67)a all (of) the people

b those of his students who knew him c few of his enemies

The only difference between pre-determiners and other determiners is that when they appear in front of a DP the pre-determiner has an optional of whereas this is obligatory with other types of determiner. The fact that we can have a post-determiner in this position is interesting. We have stated that these come in specifier of NP, but where is the NP in (67c) that the post-determiner is in the specifier of? If there is an NP in this structure the head of which cannot be seen, it seems that we are forced to assume that this head is an unpronounced empty category and therefore the structure must be something like the following:

D©

D NP

e P©

P DP

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Of course, as we saw previously, caution must be exercised in proposing such empty heads to ensure that they are independently motivated and not just assumed to make the analysis work. It turns out that there is a good deal of independent evidence for the existence of this empty noun.

First, consider the presence of the preposition of which is obligatory in nearly all structures of this type, with the exception of the ‘pre-determiners’. This is the preposition we find when there is a noun which takes a DP complement:

(69)a an illustration of [DP the technique]

b a publication of [DP names and addresses] c the theory of [DP relativity]

d the record of [DP his birth]

This preposition has no meaning in these structures and it is fairly obvious that the semantic relationships hold between the noun and the following DPs. This can be most obviously seen from the fact that the verbs from which some of these nouns are formed are transitive and have no need of the preposition to express their relationship with the DP complement:

(70)a to illustrate [DP the technique]

b to publish [DP names and addresses] c to record [DP his birth]

The object of the verb is associated with accusative Case and hence must be in a Case position. But the object of the noun is not associated with any Case; indeed nouns in general cannot take bare object. We can account for these observations if we simply assume that the complement position of a noun is a Caseless position. Given the Case Filter introduced in the previous chapter, it follows that DPs are not allowed to occupy such a position at S-structure. There is nothing to prevent a noun from taking a DP complement at D-structure, however, and thematically it seems to be the case that many nouns do have DP arguments which all surface as PPs headed by the meaningless preposition of. We might therefore assume that this preposition is inserted into the structure at S-structure so that the Case Filter may be satisfied.

Note that the object of a preposition is an accusative position and hence that prepositions are Case assigners. Inserting of then allows an otherwise Caseless DP to be assigned Case. Of-insertion is however a very limited phenomenon. It happens with the DP complements of nouns and adjectives and nowhere else which might be argued to be a Caseless position:

(71)a a knowledge of karate b fed up of fish fingers

c *of him to pay his debts

It seems therefore that the appearance of the meaningless of is a good indication of the presence of a noun or an adjective. In the structure we are considering concerning the pre-determiner, the appearance of the of can be taken as strong evidence in favour of the presence of a noun even though one is not visible.

Another argument for the existence of the empty noun in pre-determiner constructions comes from their interpretation. Compare the following examples:

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(72)a some of the dancers b a group of the dancers

These two constructions are interpreted in very similar ways. (72b) involves a measure or group noun, which we have argued are non-thematic nouns lacking a specification for the F feature. Semantically these work in a very uniform way: the complement of the group noun identifies a set of individuals (in this case the dancers) and the group noun focuses on a part of this set by dividing the set up into natural quantities (groups of individuals, bottles of wine, cups of tea, etc.). This is exactly how the structure with the pre-determiner is interpreted: the set is identified by the inner DP (the dancers) and this set is partitioned into natural quantities (individual dancers in this case) and the pre-determiner quantifies these.

One possible way to account for this similarity is to assume that the empty noun in the pre-determiner structure works like a group or measure noun. Thus, if this can be maintained, there is semantic evidence for the presence of the empty noun. We can take this further by the following observation. Group nouns allow their DP complements to be fronted:

(73)a of the dancers, a group were selected to perform b of the wine, ten bottles remained unopened

c of the tea, three cups were set aside

Other nouns do not allow their complements to be fronted like this:

(74)a *of Bugsy, a photograph was distributed b *of relativity, a theory was proposed

c *of linguistics, a student was examined

With pre-determiner structures, the fronting of the of-phrase is also possible:

(75)a of the dancers, some were sent home

b of my family, all were famous cuckoo clock engineers

As this phenomenon is restricted to structures involving group nouns, it seems that this is strong evidence in favour of the assumption that pre-determiner constructions involve a group noun in the position we have proposed an empty category.

If this analysis can be maintained, then we can claim that pre-determiners are no different to other determiners (apart from the optionality of of) in that they may introduce a DP that has an NP complement with an empty head:

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D©

D NP

all N©

N PP

e (of) the people

With this analysis then we are able to accommodate all the ‘determiners’ found in English in the appropriate number and order.

4 Conclusion

In this chapter we have introduced the structure of the DP, the projection of a functional category. We will contrast this in the next chapter with the VP, which is obviously the projection of a thematic category. As far as the X-bar structure is concerned, the two are very similar. But, as we know, lexical properties have a very strong influence on structure and hence we might expect that the phrases headed by functional and thematic heads will differ to some extent.

As far as the DP is concerned, an important observation that we have made in this chapter is that the possibilities for its complementation are very limited. Determiners take NP complements or no complements. This is typical of functional heads and contrasts strongly with thematic heads. In the next chapter this difference will be made clear.

Check Questions

1How can it be argued that proper nouns and plural count nouns are also DPs?

2What evidence is available to support the assumption that pronouns are determiners heading a DP?

3How can the complementation of a D head be characterised?

4Given the assumption that the ’s morpheme occupies the D head position, what can appear as [Spec, DP]?

5What may function as adjuncts in a DP?

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Test your knowledge

Test your knowledge

Exercise 1

Determine the internal structure of the following DPs by giving their tree diagram.

(1)a all the small things

b few of the blond boys

c nearly every clever student of American history d almost all of these young animals

e any of you

f any possible solution for this exercise in English syntax

Exercise 2

Which of the following trees represent the structure of the DP in italics in the sentence below correctly? Try to find a test which can prove your statement.

(1)I know the new students of Mathematics from London.

(2)DP

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students of Mathematics

Exercise 3

Identify all the DPs in the following examples, bearing in mind that one DP may have another DP as a constituent (usually a non-immediate constituent).

(1)My colleagues like the idea that the researchers invented the most dangerous weapon ever been made.

(2)Some students who study Linguistics hate parasitic gaps.

(3)One very good reason for giving her a second chance is that she did a very good job two years ago in Paris.

Exercise 4

Give the X-bar representation of the following nominal constructions

(1)the President’s speech in the Congress

(2)some of the most recent assumptions about life

(3)the most interesting books on Physics

(4)all essays on the theory

(5)magnificent Gothic building

Exercise 5

What problems does the grammaticality of the Italian DP il mio libro raise for the analysis of determiners and possessive pronouns?

Exercise 6

Discuss the structure of the DPs a few too many parking tickets, many a pleasant day, and this very moment.

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