Chapter 2 - Grammatical Foundations: Structure(89) S
DP VP
The NP was VP
bishop S hiding DP PP
that just left a gun under DP
his mitre
In our discussion so far we have shown that whole DPs can be replaced by a
pronoun and, indeed, that a PP can be replaced by the prepositional ‘pronoun’ there.
But for VP we have used intransitive verb to demonstrate the distributional properties
of the phrase. Is there a ‘pronoun’ for a VP? I may be that the words do so function as
a kind of pronominal replacement for VPs, though its use is a little more restricted than
other pronouns:
(90) the bishop hid his gun and the verger did so too
In this example, we have two sentences: the bishop hid his gun; the verger did so too.
These two sentences are made into one sentence by placing them either side of the
word and. The phenomena is known as coordination, about which we will have more
to say in a little while. Given that the words did so in (90) are interpreted as meaning
hid his gun, we can see that they replace the VP in the second sentence, forcing this
VP to be interpreted the same as the VP of the first sentence. This is similar to the use
of the pronoun in the following:
(91) the bishop hid his gun and he jumped into the getaway car
Given this similarity, we might take the words do so to be a pronoun which replaces
VPs and hence we can test whether a constituent is a VP by seeing if it can be replaced
by do so.
The NP inside the DP may also have a pronominal replacement. Consider the
following:
(92) this robbery of a bank was more successful than that one
In this sentence the word one replaces robbery of a bank, which is an NP. Note that it
does not replace the whole DP, as do pronouns such as it, that, him, etc. We can
therefore claim that one is a pronoun which replaces NPs and hence anything that can
be replaced by one is an NP.
Pronominalising adjective phrases is more restricted than the other phrases we have
considered. It appears that only APs functioning as predicates can be pronominalised
and not those which are modifiers:
(93) a the bishop was guilty and so was the verger
b *the guilty bishop and the so verger