Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 3. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 29)

Csaba Ceglédi: On the Constituent Structure of Infinitives and Gerunds in English

INFINITIVES AND GERUNDS IN ENGLISII 103 Johnson's), A cc-ing gerunds are sentences, and at least PRO -ing construc­tions are CPs. Finally, although Abney recognizes that "Acc-ing has the distribution of a noun phrase but no other noun phrase properties," this is sufficient for him to class Acc-ing gerunds with noun phrases (1987:173). However, this observation, which is based exclusively on external syntactic considerations, does not, in itself, justify such a conclusion. As we have seen above, considerations of internal syntax appear to outweigh the single argument from distribution, which is, again, a property of Acc -ing gerunds that they share with finite as well as infinitival clauses. Therefore my conclusion is that Acc-ing gerunds and PRO-ing gerunds are sentences (either with a uniform CP structure, as Reuland argues, or with the option that some gerunds project only up to IP, as Johnson claims; I leave this issue for future research). 3.5 The Poss-ing Griffon As Abney notes, "the English Poss-/«g construction is not simply a noun phrase with sentential properties, but has a decidedly griffon-like structure. Its "forequarters" (i.e., its external distribution and its subject) are that of a noun phrase, while its "hindquarters" (its complement structure) are that of a verb phrase" (1987:165). On Abney's account, noun phrases are DPs, headed by a D(eterminer). In a noun phrase, D projects its own functional category (DP) and takes an NP complement, the projection of N.' For the purposes of the present discussion I will assume his proposal (suggested to him by Richard Larson) on which possessive 's is D. H On these assumptions, a possessive noun phrase like (83a) has the structure in (83b) (cf. Abney 1987:79): 7 In Abney's analysis, N projects a single level only, so N' = NP, a maximal pro­jection. I will not discuss this nonstandard X-bar theoretic assumption here. 8 This is not Abney's final analysis of possessive noun phrases. I prefer his V-as-D account to his V-as-case-marker analysis because I find the idea unattractive that V is a postpositional Case-marker (K). I cannot discuss my reservations about it in detail here; suffice it to say that it would be a most peculiar category in English (the only one, and a very special one, of its kind), and, second, this account does not generalize to languages like Hungarian (as Abney claims), where there are no postpositional Case-markers, since Hungarian postpositions assign both Case and theta-role to their arguments (which K does not do).

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