The internal structure of NPs headed by focus particles

Abstract

This article investigates the internal structure of NPs headed by the restrictive particle only in English. The working assumption is that despite the high syntactic mobility of the particle, noun phrases headed by only exhibit a uniform structure and a fairly uniform syntactic behaviour. The paper investigates the merge configuration of the particle and its syntactic positions in the clause structure and it proves, in the frame of the copy theory of movement, that the structure of the only-phrase is unitary in all three configurations (only-NP, only-vP, LP only) the apparent differences being due to different spell-out options.

Keywords

• focus particle
• copy theory of movement
• merge operation
• phase periphery