Syntax I

I’ve had a number of questions about homework 8 over the past few days, and I haven’t had an opportunity to collect them together and post them, but operating on the principle of “better late than never”, here are some of them.

General comments: In the example tree, I accidentally left out the CP at the top. There should have been a null (silent) C there. Since it wasn’t in the example, you don’t really have to draw the CP, but it would be good practice to put it there.

Sentence a) (The senator’s introduction of his mother to the president was discussed for a week). The best approach to the subject here would be to think about the verbal version of the subject DP (The senator introduced his mother to the president) and then just make the structure of the DP parallel. Same θ-roles are assigned, and the structure is basically the same.

Sentence b) (With remarkable enthusiasm, the AG sang about eagles). Keep the linear order (the order in which the words come when you say them) in mind when you are deciding where with remarkable enthusiasm goes in the structure: The subject (the AG)is in the specifier of TP and with remarkable enthusiasm precedes that. The AG here refers to the Attorney General, incidentally. Also, sing in this sentence is an intransitive verb.

Sentence c) (Our discussion of previous students’ failures in exams traumatized every nervous student in class yesterday). There are a lot of things going on in this sentence. So, one thing we have is discussion, the nominal version of the verb discuss, as in We discussed the news. It’s a regular transitive verb. When we turn it into a noun (discussion), it’s still transitive. For students’ failures in exams, consider two things. First, the verb in Bill failed is unaccusative. Second, the topic here is students’ failures, these failures happened to be in exams.

Sentence d) (Merlin’s remarkable recovery from his hideous disease surprised the evil warlocks’ chief curser). You can treat recovery here in much the same way you treated failures above. Recovery is something that happens to you, not something you go out and do. Also, there is a possession relation between the evil warlock and chief curser.