Np Week Quotes

The notion that Saint Nicholas—a.k.a. Kris Kringle or Santa Claus—lives at the North Pole seems to have a much more recent vintage. The earliest known reference to Saint Nick’s polar residence comes from a Thomas Nast cartoon in an 1866 issue of Harper’s Weekly—the artist captioned a collection of his Yuletide engravings “Santa Claussville, N.P.” Still, the larger idea behind Nast’s conceit—of a warm, jolly, beneficent place at the apex of the world where people might live—had ancient roots, and it spoke to America’s consuming fascination with the North Pole throughout the 1800s.

The NPs in Figure 7.1 have an internal constituent generally known as ‘N-bar’ (N' or ), which we have not yet mentioned. N-bars may consist solely of nouns or, as here, of nouns with qualifiers, excluding determiners (i.e. articles, demonstrative or possessive adjectives, or quantifiers such as many) and adjuncts. They need to be treated as sub-constituents of the NP by virtue of certain properties which they alone have. For example, in complex noun phrases, they can generally be replaced by the pro-form one, a property not lost on the writers of Friends in the 1990s. In each of these titles one can be replaced by, for example, ‘episode’, ‘Friends episode’, or even ‘weekly Friends episode’: •  The One with the Sonogram at the End •  The One Where Underdog Gets Away •  The One After the Ski Trip