4.2.1 Determiners and Complements
We have already seen two subcategories of determiner: those which take NP complements and those which take no complement. There are also determiners which take optional NP complements:
| (33) | a | the proposal | *the |
| b | *him proposal | him | |
| c | that proposal | that |
Determiners are rather boring in this respect and it seems that there are no other possibilities. This, as it turns out is very typical of functional categories as a whole, as they all have very limited complement taking abilities. However, even if the range of complements of the determiner is very limited, the arrangement of the determiner and its NP complement still conforms to the general pattern of head–complement relationships in English with the head preceding the complement:
| (34) |
As we have seen, the determiner may impose restrictions on its NP complement, particularly in terms of number: singular determiners take singular NP complements and plural determiners take plural NP complements. Some determiners take mass NP complements, and we have seen that the empty definite determiner takes a proper NP complement:
| (35) | singular | plural | mass | proper | |
| complement | complement | complement | complement | ||
| a man | *a men | *a sand | ?a Jim | ||
| *both man | both men | *both sand | *both Jim | ||
| some man | some men | some sand | ?some Jim | ||
| *e[+def] man | *e[+def] men | *e[+def] sand | e[+def] Jim | ||
| *e[–def] man | e[–def] men | e[–def] sand | *e[–def] Jim |
As heads, determiners also project their properties to the phrase and so a plural indefinite determiner will head a plural indefinite DP. We can see this from the following observations:
| (36) | a | there are some men in the garden |
| b | there is a man in the garden | |
| c | *there is/are the man/men in the garden | |
| d | the man is in the garden | |
| e | the men are in the garden |
As we have pointed out, only indefinite DPs can appear in the post-verbal position in there sentences. Interestingly, in this construction the verb appears to agree with the post-verbal element. So in (36a) the post-verbal DP is indefinite, the sentence being grammatical, and the verb is in the plural form. The determiner some is an indefinite plural determiner and these properties are projected to the whole phrase. The determiner a is indefinite and singular and hence the DP that it heads can go in the post-verbal position of a there sentence and the verb will be in its singular form, as in (36b). The determiner the is definite, but unmarked for number. Therefore it cannot head a DP in the post-verbal position of a there sentence (36c), but it can trigger either singular or plural agreement on the verb when it sits in the canonical subject position, (36d) and (36e), depending on what NP it takes as a complement.
We can represent these relationships in the following way:
| (37) |