Suggested Answers and Hints - Chapter 4Exercise 19
(ii) XP XP Y; XP XP YP;
X' X' Y; X' X' YP;
X X Y; X X YP
The second member of the first pair, the second member of the second pair and the
first member of the third pair are exemplified in the text. Bar-level constituents can
never appear as adjuncts.(iii) Adverbial PPs and clauses are discussed in the text as potentially exocentric.
Constructions which appear to have more than one head: participles, gerunds.(iv)
(1) a He being the owner, we were all given a free drink.
b Who wants ice cream? Me.
c Her cheat on him? Never.
The sentence (1a) contains what is traditionally called an absolutive construction,
where the subject of the non-finite clause can be in nominative. This construction is
also grammatical with an accusative subject in the non-finite clause, though. That is in
line with assumptions about the distribution of nominative and accusative forms in
English but the nominative form is not, its grammaticality is unexplained – perhaps it
is some default form of the pronoun that occurs in situations when no case assigner is
present. This is contradicted by the sentence in (1b) where in a structure that contains
no case assigner it is the accusative form that appears and not the nominative – perhaps
it is the accusative which is the default form in English. The situation is the same in
sentence (1c), it is the accusative and not the nominative form that occurs. One can
accept the assumption that in English it is the accusative which functions as the default
form; the nominative form in (1a) is unexplained.Chapter
Check Questions
Q1 The starting point is that proper nouns and plural count nouns do not contain
determiners. However, they have the same distribution as other nominal phrases that
do contain determiners. Determiners are marked for number (in languages other than
English for gender and even case) and they encode the definite–indefinite distinction
(e.g. a man versus the man) which is not marked on the noun. Hence it is assumed that
determiners are heads taking NP complements. As regards proper nouns, they can in
fact appear with determiners even in English and it is normal for a proper noun to
appear with a determiner in German (ich bin der Hans). Those proper nouns that do
not tolerate a determiner appear with a phonologically empty (unpronounced) D head.
This is supported by the interpretation of the proper noun as definite – determiners are
the locus of the definiteness feature and not nouns. Plural count nouns represent the
opposite in that when they appear without a determiner they are interpreted as