Exercise 2.2 Tree (1c) does the best job of representing the constituent structure of the sentence "I put the car in the garage." It treats "the car," "in the garage," and "put the car in the garage" as constituents, thereby accounting for the fact that each of these phrases can be substituted by a pro-form. Thus, we have

  1. I put it in the garage.
  2. I put the car there.
  3. Mary didn't put the car in the garage but I did so.
These constituents can also be moved and questioned. The first two can also be the focus of an it-cleft. The trees in (1a) and (1b) are not in any direct way consistent with these facts.

Trees (2a) and (2b) are both preferable to (2c) as structures for "I know the guy with the fedora." Substitution of a pronoun for the direct object must replace the entire phrase "the guy with the fedora" and not just "the guy." The movement and it-cleft tests are less informative because PPs in English can be extraposed. Thus, the following sentences are not entirely unacceptable

  1. which guy with the fedora do you know ==> ??which guy do you know with the fedora
  2. the guy with the fedora, you know ==> ??the guy, you know with the fedora
Tree (2a), though binary branching, has a problem that (2b) does not. (2a) (1a as well) uses a structure that introduces determiners recursively. This implies that noun phrases can begin with more than one determiner, which is false.