Talking to a couple of you earlier today, it came to my attention that there’s something funny about (i) in part 1 when you’re doing the constituency tests. This part is testing the constituency of received a book of postcards from Greece. What’s funny about it is the way the tense works. Received is in the past tense. And pretty much none of the tests except the replacement test really stands a chance if you treat received as just a word.

When you do the constituency tests on this one, I would suggest thinking of the sentence as if it were The elated student of history did receive a book of postcards from Greece. Specifically, separate the tense from the verb using did and then the bare form of the verb. If you perform the constituency tests on receive a book of postcards from Greece (rather than received), I think you’ll find that the tests work much better.

This will actually match better how we will eventually analyze verbs like received. And, even thinking back to syntax from LX250, tense kind of lived in I, and the verb lived in V. We’re going to be thinking of them as two separate pieces in the trees, although when they’re next to each other, they get pronounced together as a past tense verb form. But when you split them up, you wind up with did (for the tense) and the verb without tense inflection. E.g., It was sing the blues that Pat did would be the clefting test you’d use for the sentence Pat sang the blues while testing for the constituency of sang the blues.