Under the bed

[Robert Levine]

There is an excellent paper on the status of PPs appearing in subject and
object position by Ewa Jaworska which has been for some reason almost totally
ignored and which makes an excellent case for taking `under the bed' and
its ilk to be PPs, period:

@ARTICLE{jaworska86,
author =  "Jaworska, Eva",
journal = "Journal of Linguistics",
volume = 22,
pages = "335--374",
title = "Prepositional phrases as subjects and objects",
year = 1986}


I find Ewa's arguments very persuasive and have yet to see any stronger
arguments on the other side (i.e, that the PPs in question are exhaustively
dominated by an NP node). Note further that it's not just PPs you have
to extend this treatment to:

	Proud of yourself is not how you should be feeling right now.
	Is proud of yourself how you should be feeling right now?

	Extremely happily is how she greeting the news
	Was extremely happily REALLY how she greeted the news??

	To understand all is to forgive all, etc.

It seems to me that the structure

	NP
	|
	ZP

which the analysis in question posits is simply a notation identifying
a ZP which shows up in places where for some reason one feels that
only NPs ought to go. But this seems to me to be no better motivated
than assuming that in

     Robin is a doctor

`Robin' is actually an AP, because NPs are `really' referential and so
when they show up in pedicative positions, they are disguised APs or
VPs or whatever. (I didn't make this up: Paul Postal, in his paper
`Contrasting extraction types' published in JoL and reproduced in
THREE INVESTIGATIONS OF EXTRACTIONS, offers just this analysis and
offers syntactic arguments on its behalf...). I just don't see strong
grounds for *either* of these exocentric proposals, Joan's arguments
in her inversion paper notwithstanding...

Bob