Chapter 4 - The Determiner PhraseThe contracted auxiliary attaches itself to the end of the subject in much the same way
that the possessive morpheme attaches itself to the end of the possessor. The difference
is, however, that with the contracted auxiliary there is an uncontracted form:
(44) a the man is going
b the man that I told you about is going
c the man that you met is going
(45) a the man will do it
b the man that I told you about will do it
c the man that you met will do it
Presumably, what happens when the auxiliary verb contracts is that it undergoes some
process which attaches it to the subject. Very likely this is not a syntactic movement,
but a phonological process which takes place after the structure has been constructed.
Evidence in favour of this comes from the comparison of auxiliary contraction and
negative contraction, which does involve a syntactic movement. When the negative
element not contracts, it sticks itself onto the auxiliary verb in front of it:
(46) a I will not talk
b I wo-n’t talk
If the auxiliary then moves, the contracted negative is taken along. Thus when the
auxiliary inverts with the subject in certain questions, the negative also inverts and
cannot be left stranded behind the subject:
(47) a could 1 -n’t you t 1 be more precise?
b *could 1 you t 1 -n’t be more precise?
In contrast to this, a contracted auxiliary never moves along with a subject that it is
attached to:
(48) a D-structure: Theodore thinks [who –’ll win]
b S-structure *who 1 ’ll does Theodore think [t 1 win]
Indeed, auxiliaries can contract onto a subject that has moved to the position in front of
the auxiliary, suggesting that this contraction takes place after movement:
(49) a D-structure: [DP e] will seem [this man to disappear]
b S-structure: this man 1 ’ll seem [t 1 to disappear]
The point is, however, that there is a process which takes an independent word and
sticks it to the phrase immediately in front of it. If this is what is going on with the
possessive construction in English, then the ‘’s’ morpheme must originate as an
independent word which sits in a position immediately following the possessor. Given
that the word position immediately following the possessor is the determiner, we
conclude that the morpheme ‘’s’ must be a determiner. Unlike auxiliaries, this