Basic English Grammar with Exercises

Testing for Structure

As we can see the pronoun for APs is so, though as it is restricted to predicative APs
and it also plays a role in Pronominalising VPs, we might consider it as a general
pronoun for replacing predicates. Nevertheless it can still be used as a constituent test
as anything that functions as a predicate is a constituent of one type or another.
Finally in this section, let us consider pronouns which replace clauses. In some
cases, the pronoun it can be used for this purpose:

(94) they said the bishop robbed the bank, but I don’t believe it

Given that the it stands for the bishop robbed the bank and that this is a clause, this
word can be claimed to be a clausal pronoun (as well as a DP pronoun).
The word so can also replace whole clauses:

(95) they said the bishop is dangerous, but I don’t think so

Thus, besides being a general predicative pronoun, so can also be a clausal pronoun.
Like other pronouns, then, it can provide us with evidence as to what counts as a
constituent in a sentence.

3.2 Movement

There are other aspects of distribution we might use to support a structural analysis of
a clause. For example, the distribution of an element refers to the set of positions that
that element may occupy. Sometimes we can identify a number of positions that an
element might be able to occupy in related sentences:

(96) a the policeman searched the bishop
b the bishop, the policeman searched

Both of these sentences are grammatical in English, though the second one seems
to have a special status and the first is more ‘normal’ in this respect. To start with, the
second sentence seems to give a special interpretation to the bishop. The meaning can
be understood in a context in which there are a group of people being searched,
including the bishop, and these are being searched by various people. We might
therefore have an extended context:

(97) the policewoman searched the nun, the chief constable searched the vicar and
the bishop, the policeman searched.

We call the element in front of the subject that has this interpretation the topic.
Note that in this case the topic is also interpreted as the object: the one being
searched. This is why this structure seems to be special with respect to the one in
(96a), where the object has no extra aspects to its interpretation. From a syntactic point
of view, the interesting observation is that the topic is a separate position, somewhere
in front of the subject. We might account for why the element which sits in this
position is interpreted as both the object and the topic by proposing that the object is
moved into the topic position:

(98) the bishop, the policeman searched –