Syntax I

I got a question about what “DP” and “CP” are, referred to in the upper left corner of page 4 of the handout from class 3A (”theta roles, feature checking”).

Sorry, I’m not sure how those got there, but we haven’t talked about DP and CP and won’t for some time. But just so you know anyway, a DP is a “noun phrase” basically and a CP is a “clause”.

Since we’re here, just a preview: The reason I called the noun phrase a “DP” is because it will actually turn out that the head of something like the students is the (not students). So, DP is to D as VP is to V as any XP is to its head. And a CP is a similar kind of thing, this is the kind of phrase whose head is a complementizer (like that).

But my inclusion of those terms in such an early handout was unintentional, so just read “noun phrase” instead of “DP” and “clause” instead of “CP” for now.