APPLYING KEY IDEASDirections: Identify the deep structure for each of the following sentences:
- Macarena was the woman who danced on the bar at China Club.
- The high heels that she was wearing almost slipped on the slick surface.
- A bartender who knew her grabbed Macarena’s arm.
- The patrons who were seated at the bar laughed at her in good fun.
5.Macarena dropped the drink that she had in her hand.
Relativizing Noun Phrases in Prepositional Phrases
The relative clause rule recognizes that sometimes a duplicate NP appears as
the object of a preposition, and we have to relativize it, as in sentence 14. This
procedure raises some interesting grammatical questions:
- Fred loved the housein which the couple lived.
This sentence is made up of the following clauses:- Fred loved the house/the couple lived in the house
We see immediately that our RC transformation rule has a problem. It shifts
the entire PP. But in English we can choose to shift just the noun phrase, as in
sentence 14a:
14a. Fred loved the house which the couple lived in.The underlying structure for 14a is exactly the same as for sentence 14:- Fred loved the house/the couple lived in the house
Relativizing initially produces:- Fred loved the house/the couple lived in which
At this point, there must be some mechanism or operation that allows us to
decide between shifting the entire PP or just the relative pronoun. Here the
transformation rule fails us. There is no elegant way of rewriting the rule to pro-
vide the necessary mechanism, so we are forced to provide it externally with an
ad hoc provision.
NOAM CHOMSKY AND GRAMMAR 179