Basic English Grammar with Exercises - MEK

Testing for Structure(85) a *[under his mitre] disappearedb *the bishop was hiding [under his mitre](85b) is ungrammatical if we take under his mitre to name what it is that is beinghidden, equivalent to a gun in (78) (though it is grammatical with the interpretationthat it names the place where the bishop was hiding! In this case it does not function asthe object and hence is not distributing like one). We called this kind of constituent aprepositional phrase above and we will continue to assume this and therefore we canconclude that there is in fact a pronominal preposition phrase as this is what it seemsto replace.Turning to the structural position of the auxiliary verb was note also that the part ofthe VP that follows this can also be replaced by a verb:(86) [ DP the bishop that just left] was smilingWe concluded above that if something can be replaced by a verb it has the status of aVP and hence we have one VP inside another in this case, which tallies with ourdescription of auxiliary verbs that they take verbal complements.Putting this together, we have now derived the structure:(87) SDPVPThe bishop that just left wasVPhiding DPPPa gun underDPhismitreTurning to the subject, we note that the part of this DP bishop that just left can bereplaced by a single noun:(88) [ DP the impostor] [ VP was [ VP hiding [ DP a gun] [ PP under [ DP his mitre]]]]We may conclude, therefore that this part of the structure is also a phrase, presumablya noun phrase, as the word impostor is a noun. This NP is constructed of a nounfollowed by that just left, which as it is introduced by a complementiser we canconclude is some kind of a clause, though admittedly it doesn’t look much like aclause and a lot more needs to be said to show that it is. For now, let us just accept thatit is a clause and stop our analysis at this point. What we have therefore is thefollowing structure:77