Testing for Structure(85) a [under his mitre] disappeared
b the bishop was hiding [under his mitre]
(85b) is ungrammatical if we take under his mitre to name what it is that is being
hidden, equivalent to a gun in (78) (though it is grammatical with the interpretation
that it names the place where the bishop was hiding! In this case it does not function as
the object and hence is not distributing like one). We called this kind of constituent a
prepositional phrase above and we will continue to assume this and therefore we can
conclude that there is in fact a pronominal preposition phrase as this is what it seems
to replace.
Turning to the structural position of the auxiliary verb was note also that the part of
the VP that follows this can also be replaced by a verb:
(86) [DP the bishop that just left] was smiling
We concluded above that if something can be replaced by a verb it has the status of a
VP and hence we have one VP inside another in this case, which tallies with our
description of auxiliary verbs that they take verbal complements.
Putting this together, we have now derived the structure:
(87) S
DP VP
The bishop that just left was VP
hiding DP PP
a gun under DP
his mitre
Turning to the subject, we note that the part of this DP bishop that just left can be
replaced by a single noun:
(88) [DP the impostor] [VP was [VP hiding [DP a gun] [PP under [DP his mitre]]]]
We may conclude, therefore that this part of the structure is also a phrase, presumably
a noun phrase, as the word impostor is a noun. This NP is constructed of a noun
followed by that just left, which as it is introduced by a complementiser we can
conclude is some kind of a clause, though admittedly it doesn’t look much like a
clause and a lot more needs to be said to show that it is. For now, let us just accept that
it is a clause and stop our analysis at this point. What we have therefore is the
following structure: