When you make an argument you must show your data, using example sentences.

[p. 61] State whether this is a real constituent and what criteria you applied to determine that result:

(6a) Susanne gave [the minivan to Petunia.]

Zero credit answer number 1: the minivan to Petunia is not a constituent. It fails to function as a unit.

Zero credit answer number 2: the minivan to Petunia is not a constituent. It fails the replacement, standalone, movement, and coordination tests.

Zero credit answer number 3: the minivan to Petunia is not a constituent. It fails to standalone as a sentence fragment. You cannot do passive, clefting, or preposing with it.

Now why is this last one bad? Two reasons. First, I still dont know whether you know what you're talking about because you have not presented the evidence you used to reach your conclusion. namely a senetnce that you judged ungrammatical. There are passive, cleftings, and preposings that DO work in this case:

1. The minivan was given to Petunia.
2. It was the minivan that Susanne gave to Petunia.
3. The minivan was what Susanne gave to Petunia.

The second reason this answer is bad is methodological: We are doing generative grammar, that is, engaging in cognitive science, which means among other things that we have decided to go beyond corpora and use the grammaticality judgments of native speakers as primary data. This means negative judgments are primary data. The fact that a native speaker finds a particular sentence ungrammatical is going to be crucial evidence in all our arguments. We need to know what sentence it is and sometimes even what structure that "candidate" sentence is being assigned because we are going to use evidence like that to make claims about structural constraints that are part of universal grammar.

The moral? If you say something "can't" be done or doesnt happen, construct sentences that are bad to show that it can't be done. Equally important, mark these sentences with asterisks (*) if YOU judge them bad, to help guide me through your argument.

In this case, here's what we need, the relevant movement evidence:

1. * It was the minivan to Petunia that Susanne gave.
2. * The minivan to Petunia was what Susanne gave.
3. * The minivan to Petunia was given (by Susanne). [by-phrases not needed in passive examples]

Notice it's important for the argument to work that there not be some independent reason why these sentences are bad. So the art of constructing a convincing negative example is to try to make the examples as plausible as possible, and to remove as many interefering factors as possible. So the examples should be short; you should have an idea of what one would be trying to express with this sentence, and what would be expressed should make sense.

To this end syntacticians often use minimal syntactic pairs in making arguments. Minimal syntactic pairs are sentences which usually mean the same thing and differ only in some syntactic property. One meber of the pair is ghood, one member is bad. The sentences are so close that the only explanation for the badness of the bad example is its minimally differing syntactic property. In this case there are natural candidates to provide us with minimal pairs.

1. Clefting
   1. It was the minivan that Susanne gave to Petunia.
   2. * It was the minivan to Petunia that Susanne gave.
2. Preposing
   1. The minivan was what Susanne gave to Petunia.
   2. * The minivan to Petunia was what Susanne gave.
   3. Passive
      1. The minivan was given to Petunia.
      2. * The minivan to Petunia was given
      The good sentences differ from the bad ones only in the syntactic property of how much has been moved. Thus it cant be the meanings that are responsible for the anomaly. That anomaly would be explained if we assume that a minivan to Petunia is NOT a constituent. because we are assuming non constituents can't be moved by clefting, preposing, and passive.

      Notice the structure of the argument in this case. The primary data excluding constituency is negative (ungrammatical sentences). The positive sentence are there to help us exclude alternatiuve explanations for why the sentences might sound funny.

This is not an easy question.

Many of you DID use negative data but you had some surprising judgements. I suspect you were just conflating awkwardnmess with ungrammaticality.

Example:

1. It was a passionate love letter from Stacy that Clyde got.

Unquestionably in most contexts it would be avoided. But that's not the question here. The question is: Is it inapprorpiate in all contexts?

That is, if you can think of a context in which the candidate sentence would be perfectly appropriate, then it is not ungrammatical. How about this?

• Clyde looks a little preoccupied reading his mail over there. Did Clyde just get another bill?
• No, it was a passionate love letter from Stacy that Clyde got.

So the general rule is: When judging a sentence, try to give it its best shot. Find a good context. Having a minimal pair is a good tool for assuring there are appropriate contexts, but when minimal pairs are unavailable just try to find a good discourse context.

The following judgement feels right:

* A passionate love letter from Stacy was gotten by Clyde.

This anomaly was used as an argument for the non-constituency of a passionate love letter from Clyde.

But could there be another explanation?

? A letter was gotten by Clyde

The moral: Test the quality of your arguments by looking for alternative explanations of the badness of a sentence. If the ungrammaticality of a sentence has an alternative explanation, modify the example in some way to block the alternative explanation and see if the sentence is still ungrmmatical.

In this case we are interested in whether a passionate love letter from Stacy is a constituent. There are two directions we could go.

1. We can use movement tests other passive.
2. WE can change the verb, since it is not central to our argument.

Way one:

1. It was a love letter from Stacu that Clyde got.
2. A love letter from Stacy is what Clyde got.

Way two:

1. [They] found a love letter from Stacy ion the defendant's sock drawer,
2. A love lettter from Stacy was found in the defendant's sock drawer.

We conclude with a short eclectic list of things that can go wrong in constructing an example.

1. Overgeneralizing a syntactic process in trying to apply a movement test. As we just saw, passive has lexical exceptions:
   1. Mary had a little lamb.
   2. * A lamb was had by Mary. [at least on possession reading]
   Always test to make sure the verb passivizes.

   Al;so: Only apply passive to NPs. The only thing that ever gets moved by passivization is an NP. Some people used this example in the particle problem:

   * Out the light was blown by John.
   Th eproblem is this example would be ungrammatical on EITHER of the proposed constituent structures in that problem
   1. [_V blow out ] [_NP the light ]]
   2. [_V blow [_PP out [_NP the light ]]]
   You can never passivize a PP:
   [They] flew over the field.
   *Over the field was flown.
2. Information packaging
   1. They gave the book to John/ They gave John the book.
   2. They gave it to John./ * They gave John it.
   3. They looked the address up./ They looked up the address.
   4. They looked it up/ * They looked up it.
   5. He shot a large 3-point buck./? A large 3-point buck was shot by him
3. Semantics/pragmatics
   * Know the answer.

When doing the standalone test always provide a context that would make a fragment make sense.

For example, this is right:

1. What did John blow out?
2. * Out the candle
3. The candle.

This is wrong:

* out the candle.

With fragment and ellipsis tests context is always critical. For example, "Nixon thinks with a fork" sounds pretty weird but in the right context:

1. How did Gerald Ford eat his salad?
2. Nixon thinks with a fork.

The correct structure is [[V P] NP].

The key weak point of the other proposal is that it makes [P NP] a constituent. But there is strong evidence that this is wrong:

1. Standalone:
   1. What did John blow out?
   2. * out the candle.
   3. Movement:
      1. It was out the candle John blew.
      2. Out the candle is what John blew.
   4. Replacement: THere is no clear replacement data.