著者

板垣 完一

出版者

東北大学

雑誌

国際文化研究科論集 (ISSN:13410857)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.2, pp.67-77, 1994-12-20

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We limit our discussion to the type of NP in Englsih whose internal structure is Article+Noun+NP-complement where NP-complement works as the content clause of the preceeding Noun. We discuss three problems concerning the relation between the Article and NP-complement within that NP construction. First, we are concerned with the 'first-mention use' of the extensively discussed by Hawkins (1978) trying to make this concept clearer and argue that this use of the is not different from its basic use. Second, we discuss why the sentence Bill is amazed by a fact that there is so much life on earth is not acceptable while the sentence Bill is amazed by the fact that there is so much life on earth is good and present our speculation that this might be attributable to the uncountability of the head noun of the NP under discussion. Third we focus on the existential there-construction whose notional subject is the NP of the 'first-mention use' and argue that this type of sentence poses us an explanatory problem because we have another type of existential there-construction whose notinal subject is an indefinite NP.