Basic English Grammar with Exercises

Chapter 4 - The Determiner Phrase

This is not a good argument, however, as it is not wise to conclude about the
syntactic properties of an element on the basis of its semantic properties. There are
many elements which might be considered to be the syntactic head of a phrase which
are not the semantically most important word. For example, consider the following:

(3) cups of tea

Semantically, the noun tea is the most important element in this phrase: it refers to
something which can be described as tea and not a cup. When one drinks a cup of tea,
it is the tea that gets drunk, not the cup! Yet, syntactically it seems that cup should be
considered as the head and the phrase containing tea as its complement. This provides
us with a straightforward structure:

(4) NP

N'

N PP

cups of tea

If, on the other hand, we wanted to claim that the noun tea is the syntactic head of
the phrase we would have difficulty fitting in the preposition and the other noun:

(5) NP

cups?

of?

N

tea

Neither of these elements appears to behave like either a specifier or an adjunct and so
the analysis is highly problematic.
Another case where it might be argued that the syntactic head of a phrase is not the
most important semantic element within it concerns preposition phrases:

(6) a go [to London]
b look [through the tunnel]

In these cases, as in those above, the preposition does contribute something to the
meaning of the phrase, though it is not clear that this should be seen as the most
important aspect of the meaning of the whole phrase. Indeed London and tunnel seem
to contribute just as important, if not more important information. However, it would
not make sense to claim that the nouns are the heads of these phrases as they are
clearly not NPs, not having the distribution of NPs:

(7) a go [London]
b look [the tunnel]