somebody asked to following three questions related to problem 6 in chapter 2. 



1) can a nominative or accusative begin with a determiner? (i.e. should a NP-Nominative-Singular be (D) Nominative-Singular or just Nominative-Singular?)

2) can a nominative or accusative be followed by a prepositional phrase? 

3) Can you give us an example of a intransitive verb and a ditransitive verb? We couldn't think of any.



 

ad 1) Maybe it is unclear what is meant by accusative and nominative. Consider the example sentence:



(a) I emailed him.



where "I" is the first person, singular, nominative pronoun and "him" is the third person, singular, masculine accusative pronoun. Just think what you could substitute for the pronouns in both positions. So for example,



(b) A student emailed the TAs.



I hope that answers the question whether those two "types" of NPs (i.e. the accusative NP and the nominative NP) can have determiners (e.g. "a" and "the" in example (b)).





ad 2) Consider the following example



(c) A student of LIN120 emailed the TAs of that class.



So, for NPs (nominative and accusative) it seems - at least in principle (pronouns like e.g. "I" or "me" cannot be followed by a PP within the NP) - to be possible to be followed by a PP. 



ad 3) Well, this probably relates more to problem 5, chapter 2 ... let me try to define what is meant by "intransitive", etc.:



(d) an intransitive verb describes an event that has one "participant" (entities involved in it): e.g. dance, sleep, ... as in:



- Peter danced/slept.



(e) an transitive verb describes an event that has two "participants": e.g. love, meet, etc. ... as in:



- Kim loves/met Harry Potter.



(f) a ditransitive verb describes an event that has three "participants": e.g. tell, give, send, etc. as in:



- You sent me an email.

- I told you the answer.

- Kim gave Harry Potter a book.



I hope that helps.



Florian