HW7: Hints
On the homework, a couple of notes. First, problem 2 seems to be riddled with typos. Of course, liebte should be how the verb is spelled in both (f) and (h), Prinzessin should always appear with both ns, etc. Sorry about that.
Second, just what is being asked for? First, do not fail to read the two statements under the heading Assume the following things. Your answers to the questions in problem 2 can’t contradict those things.
Question 1 asks you to describe and explain the process, but skip that momentarily and jump straight to the bolded question: What English phenomenon is this similar to? We talked about it in class. The answer to this question is the title of at least one of the slides. So, identify the phenomenon in English that is like what we’re seeing in German first, and then it should be relatively straightforward to say what is going on (that is, to “describe and explain the process”).
Question 2 about the different structures. People are finding this to be a little bit tricky. The two different structures are really not very different at all. I’ll give you a hint about this here: Think about building up the DP Die schlanke Frau aus Frankreich. You have a PP, aus Frankreich, a noun Frau, and an adjective schlanke, all of which you combine first, before merging the resulting NP with the D Die to get a DP. Frau doesn’t itself have any strong features to check. Moreover, aus Frankreich can’t be a complement of Frau—it simply wouldn’t mean the right thing. Pretty much the only kinds of PP that can be an N-complement are those PPs that have of (or von) as the head. So, Frau is “complete”, it is “happy”, it has no strong uninterpretable features to check—it is an NP. So you have to attach both the adjective schlanke and the PP aus Frankreich to the NP, and you can’t use Merge to do it because there are no strong uninterpretable features to check. If you think about this from the bottom up (”First, I have Frau, which is an NP. Then, I take…”), it might become fairly evident at which point you have to make a choice that could have as easily been made the other way. And it would result in structures that each interact with the phenomenon discussed in Question 1 in a slightly different way.
Ok, enough hinting for now.