Against the parallelism between the NP and the clause: Evidence from idioms

We argue that the counterpart of Marantz’s generalization does not hold in the nominal domain, because there are idioms in which the determiner and the noun receive an idiomatic meaning while the PP that modifies the noun is not part of the idiom (we call these “PP-less idioms”). We show that PP-less idioms are fully expected if the hypothesis of parallelism between nominal structure and clausal structure is dropped and it is assumed that the first step of the derivation in the nominal domain involves merge of D and N. As for the mirror image of PP-less idioms, “PP-containing idioms”, namely DPs where N and the PP that follows the noun receive an idiomatic reading while D does not, we suggest that they are not generated by syntax but are rather the output of the morphological component.