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.