Suggested answer for Exercise 8

(1)	a.	*Up the letter John tore.
	b.	The letter, John tore up.
(2)	a.	*Whose did you meet mother?
	b.	Whose mother did you meet?
(3)	a.	*Friends were financially supported of the President.
	b.	Friends of the President were financially supported.
(4)	a.	*The fact surprised everybody that he had resigned.
	b.	The fact that he had resigned surprised everybody.

(i) The contrast between sentences (1a) and (1b) suggests that the constructions up and the letter do not form a constituent. Only those items can be moved as one unit that form a constituent. The DP the letter and the particle up do not form a PP. Otherwise sentence (1a) would be grammatical but the particle and the DP is part of VP, which includes the verb, as well

As the grammaticality in sentence (1b) shows the items the and letter form a constituent, the reason why the and letter can undergo topicalisation as one unit.

 

(ii) In sentence (2a) the problem is that the question words whose and the noun mother are separated by moving the question word to a sentence-initial position and leaving the noun in its original position, in situ. This is obvious as sentence (2b) is grammatical as both the question word and the noun move to the sentence-initial position. The hypothesis is that the question word and the noun form one constituent; therefore they cannot be separated by movement. The common wisdom about the whose-N construction is that the noun is the lexical head of the DP and whose is the functional head of the DP as in (5). Wh movement moves a maximal projection, therefore when whose moves, it cannot move alone but as a maximal projection, in this case, as the DP containing whose. This DP includes the NP whose head is book.

(5)

 

(iii) Sentences (3a) and (3b) are passive sentences in which the object of the active sentence (They financially supported the friends of the President) becomes the subject of the passive sentence. In (3a) the object is broken up into two parts: the determiner–noun sequence and the preposition–determiner phrase sequence. The determiner–noun sequence moves to the subject position while the preposition–determiner phrase remains in situ. This is not possible as the sentence proves to be ungrammatical. In sentence (3b) all the elements that constitute the object move to the subject position and the sentence is grammatical. It seems reasonable to assume that all the elements of the object form one constituent; therefore syntactic operations cannot separate them.

(6)

The sequence the-friends cannot move without the PP complement, as the DP that includes the definite article and the noun contains the PP as well. Technically speaking, there is no node that dominates the determiner and the noun head, but does not dominate the PP complement.

 

(iv) In sentences (4a) and (4b) the subject of the non-finite subordinate clause moves to the subject position of the matrix sentence. In sentence (4a) only a part of the subject moves, the complement clause of the head of the subject DP remains in its original position and this gives us the wrong result. The complement DP cannot be separated from the head and the determiner as they form one constituent.

(7)

The complement CP is part of the phrases headed by the noun and the determiner, respectively, while there is no common node that dominates D and N but does not dominate the complement clause.