Exercise 8As the grammaticality in sentence (1b) shows the items the and letter form a
constituent, the reason why the and letter can undergo topicalisation as one unit.
(ii) In sentence (2a) the problem is that the question words whose and the noun
mother are separated by moving the question word to a sentence-initial position and
leaving the noun in its original position, in situ. This is obvious as sentence (2b) is
grammatical as both the question word and the noun move to the sentence-initial
position. The hypothesis is that the question word and the noun form one constituent;
therefore they cannot be separated by movement. The common wisdom about the
whose-N construction is that the noun is the lexical head of the DP and whose is the
functional head of the DP as in (5). Wh movement moves a maximal projection,
therefore when whose moves, it cannot move alone but as a maximal projection, in this
case, as the DP containing whose. This DP includes the NP whose head is book.
(5) DP
DP D'
whose D NP
N'
N
book
(iii) Sentences (3a) and (3b) are passive sentences in which the object of the active
sentence (They financially supported the friends of the President) becomes the subject
of the passive sentence. In (3a) the object is broken up into two parts: the determiner–
noun sequence and the preposition–determiner phrase sequence. The determiner–noun
sequence moves to the subject position while the preposition–determiner phrase
remains in situ. This is not possible as the sentence proves to be ungrammatical. In
sentence (3b) all the elements that constitute the object move to the subject position
and the sentence is grammatical. It seems reasonable to assume that all the elements of
the object form one constituent; therefore syntactic operations cannot separate them.
(6) DP
D'
D NP
the N'
N PP
friends of the President