Having discussed a bit the status of reports about polls in homework #4 with a couple of people, I have a couple of things to observe about that.

I can say right at the outset that the way I intended this to work was basically like letters to Peter on Adger’s p. 107. That is report in this case “needs a P” [uP]. Whether that is the right way to think about reports though (or letters, for that matter) is debatable. If it needs a P, then it should presumably be bad without a P. Except it’s find to say reports by itself (I read reports all night). We could handle that one of two ways. One way is to say that there are two nouns report, one of which needs a P and the other of which doesn’t. That’s kind of how I suggested looking at eat (Pat ate vs. Pat ate a sandwich).

However, it’s nicer not to have to say that, it would be better if there was just the one noun report. And it seems like about polls is really kind of a modifier (like heavy in heavy reports). We know basically how to do that when a PP modifies the verb phrase. You could extend that same idea to noun phrases (adjoin the modifier to the completed NP). And it seems like this is right. On the table is uncontroversially this kind of modifier, and you can say both reports about polls on the table and reports on the table about polls. I’ll leave it up to you to decide why that’s an interesting fact. But it does suggest that the right way to look at about polls here is as a modifier like on the table.

Nevertheless, I’ll take either of these approaches as correct.