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Against the parallelism between the NP and the clause: Evidence from idioms

  • Carlo Cecchetto EMAIL logo and Caterina Donati
Published/Copyright: June 4, 2019

Abstract

We argue that the counterpart of Marantz’s generalization does not hold in the nominal domain, because there are idioms in which the determiner and the noun receive an idiomatic meaning while the PP that modifies the noun is not part of the idiom (we call these “PP-less idioms”). We show that PP-less idioms are fully expected if the hypothesis of parallelism between nominal structure and clausal structure is dropped and it is assumed that the first step of the derivation in the nominal domain involves merge of D and N.

As for the mirror image of PP-less idioms, “PP-containing idioms”, namely DPs where N and the PP that follows the noun receive an idiomatic reading while D does not, we suggest that they are not generated by syntax but are rather the output of the morphological component.

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Published Online: 2019-06-04
Published in Print: 2019-07-26

© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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