Exceptional and Small Clauses(31) a I ordered [PP him out of the room]
b I ordered [DP him a fool]
c I ordered [AP him foolish]
The fact that heads subcategorise for their complements in terms of the complement’s
category would seem to suggest that these clauses do indeed differ in terms of their
categorial statuses.
Opponents of this view, however, tend to point to the fact that the predicate part of
the small clause seems to have the status of a phrase and if the whole clause is the
phrase with the subject in its specifier position, the predicate should have the status of
an X':
(32) AP
DP A'
him A PP
certain of his position
One piece of evidence that the predicate has full phrasal status comes from the fact that
they seem to be able to move to phrasal positions, without taking the subject along
with them:
(33) [how certain of his position] 1 do you consider him t 1?
Within the confines of X-bar theory, one way to get both the subject and the
predicate of the clause to be phrases, is to posit a head between them of which the
subject is the specifier and the predicate the complement:
(34) XP
DP X'
him X AP
e certain of his position
But this proposal claims that the head of the predicate is no longer the head of the
whole clause and hence it no longer determines the categorial status of the clause. It
would be difficult therefore to account for the observations of (30) and (31) where
different verbs subcategorise for different small clauses in terms of the category of the
predicate. A separate question concerning (34) is what the status of X is. Haegeman
(1994) argues that this head is an agreement element, i.e. what we have been calling I.
Thus small clauses, according to Haegeman, are IPs (AgrPs in her terminology):