Homework 7 PRO

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I was just reminded of the fact that I didn’t really give any hints/instructions (except kind of indirectly in the last 30 seconds on Tuesday) about how we should draw PRO in trees, even though I have you drawing PRO in trees on the Homework.

The easy answer: Draw it with a triangle, like this:

The better answer: PRO is a pronoun, and pronouns actually are Ds all by themselves (I was starting to talk about that at the end on Tuesday), so it really should look like this:

Perhaps there should be a D' in there as well, depending on what we decide about the X-bar schema requiring a single-bar-level node.

Since I’d not given any instructions on this point, probably several/most of you will have drawn this with a silent D and a silent N/NP. I’d rather you didn’t draw it that way just because we won’t be doing it that way in the future, but you don’t need to redraw anything if that’s how you did it. It’ll be fine to do that in this homework, and the main point of the homework is to get the PRO in the right place (vs. getting its internal structure right).

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