Homework 3 and the DP

It has been brought to my attention that there is a part of homework 3 that is a bit underspecified. Specifically, there is an opportunity for you to incorporate a PP into a DP object, but it isn’t clear what I expected there, since we haven’t really talked about DP before.

What we have so far basically I think forces us into one real way to answer this, which is not ideal for a couple of reasons. But here’s what we have: Simple DPs (per the instructions) are to be represented with triangles instead of an articulated internal structure. So, if you are going to attach a modifier to a DP, it can only really be at the top level, like so:

The suboptimalness of this comes from the fact that once we do look inside the DP some more, we’ll find that modifiers like this should be attached below D. We already kind of know this from LX321/621 anyway. That is, the structure with a PP adjoined to DP is only kind of approximately like what we’re going to end up with. However, it’s good enough for the present purpose. And it’s easier than having to also confront the existence of null determiners, reasons for Merging D and NP (or the fact that it’s really going to be nP before long), etc. We’ll get there. So, for the purpose of attaching modifiers to/within DP, just adjoin them to DP for now.