Chapter 2 - Grammatical Foundations: Structurethe bull is a constituent, specifically a DP as, as argued above, pronouns are
determiners. Furthermore, the fact that worried the china-shop owner has the same
distribution as charged shows that the former is also a constituent, specifically a VP as
charge is a verb. In other words, we can use distributional observations such as these
to test the structure of any sentence: for any part of the sentence, if we find it
distributes like some element that we know what its categorial status is, then we can
assume that that part of the sentence has the same status as that element.
Let us consider another sentence to show how this might work:
(78) the bishop that just left was hiding a gun under his mitre
At first glance, you might be tempted to claim that the subject of this sentence is the
bishop. But note that this cannot be replaced by a pronoun, though the whole string the
bishop that just left can be:
(79) a *he that just left was hiding a gun under his mitre
b he was hiding a gun under his mitre
Thus we conclude that the subject of this sentence is the bishop that just left, not just
the bishop.
The rest of the sentence was hiding a gun under his mitre can be replaced by a
single verb:
(80) [the bishop that just left] disappeared
Hence we may assume that this part of the sentence constitutes the VP:
(81) S
DP VP
The bishop that just left was hiding a gun under his mitre
Turning to the VP, we note that the word a gun can also be replaced by a pronoun
it and hence this is also a DP – this time it is a DP complement, i.e. the object:
(82) [DP the bishop that just left] was hiding it under his mitre
Furthermore, the part of the sentence his mitre can also be replaced by a pronoun and
so this must be a DP too:
(83) a [DP the bishop that just left] [VP was hiding [DP a gun] under it]
b [DP the bishop that just left] [VP was hiding [DP a gun] under [DP his mitre]
Next, we note that under his mitre can be replaced by the word there:(84) [DP the bishop that just left] [VP was hiding [DP a gun] there]
This shows us that the string of words, under his mitre forms a constituent of the
sentence, but the category of this constituent is not so easy to determine from the
category of its replacement. We might suppose that there is a pronoun and therefore it
replaces DPs, but this constituent is made up of a preposition (under) followed by a
DP (his mitre) which does not distribute like a DP: