Chapter 4 - The Determiner Phrasepronounced 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:
(54) DP
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.
2.3 Adjunction 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:
(55) a tall the building (the tall building)
b he in the smart suit (the man in the smart suit)
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: