The Internal Structure of the DPdeterminer has no uncontracted form and so we never see it occupying the D position.
We thus have the following analysis:
(50) DP
DP D'
John D NP
’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:
(52) DP
DP D'
his D NP
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
contraction