Errata to Homework 3
I asked you to do the impossible in homework 3. Here I fix it, and ask you to do the merely possible…
Recall that assignment 3 asks to you obtain the derivation of the sentence some monkey was sleeping on every branch, and to identify how to interpret it so that you can obtain both readings (subject scopes over prepositional object, and vice versa). The problem is, I changed the analysis I had in mind as I was transcribing it, from one that has PP adjunction at little-v, to one that has PP adjunction at big V. (I did this for reasons discussed in Dowty’s paper.) But I made this change without making the other changes necessary to obtain the correct scope readings.
Just to clarify, the lexical items I gave you are as in figure 1.
Figure 1: Lexical items for the homework
This gives rise to the single derivation for our sentence shown in figure 2.
Figure 2: Derivation using the above lexical items
The problem is that all of the Object’s features are checked before the Subject is introduced, and thus there is no position for the Subject to reconstruct into so that the Object outscopes it. The immediate problem is that we have made scope-checking at P obligatory via the little-p head. The fix is simply to make scope-checking at P optional. We can do this by taking the 
feature off of this head (which now just looks like this: 
), and putting it on an optional P-Scope head: 
. Now it is possible to derive a pP which has something with an unchecked feature waiting to move inside of it. In order to make it possible that this thing outscopes the subject, we need to have a feature checking position above little-vP. We introduce an optional v-scope head: 
.
And voila, we’re done.
Now you can do the homework, with the caveat that there are two derivations, one for subject wide scope, and one for object wide scope!