6 - Event-Internal Adjuncts

Summary

Introduction

Goals and Principles

In previous chapters I argued for a theory in which adjuncts are free to adjoin anywhere in principle but in fact are restricted by certain semantic and syntactic effects. Syntactically, adverbial distribution is constrained by Directionality Principles, Weight theory, bounding theory, and the requirements of certain functional heads (e.g., for the position of sentence negation or the realization of aspectual auxiliaries). Semantically, it is limited by the adjuncts’ selectional properties, including scope requirements, in concert with the FEO Calculus. In this and the next two chapters, this approach is applied to a more fine-grained examination of the entire range of adverbial positions in a clause.

I start from the bottom, the “Low Range,” the domain of event-internal modification, corresponding to PredP. The adjuncts we find here include manner, domain, and measure adverbs, participant PP's, and restitutive again. The main goals are to demonstrate that the distribution of these adjuncts can be accounted for by means of the principles outlined in chapters 2–5 and to flesh out specific proposals for doing so. Recall, in particular, that the ultimate empirical goal is to do what phrase structure rules were designed to do: explicitly generate all the grammatical sentences with adjuncts in them and explicitly rule out the ungrammatical ones; but we must go beyond the stipulative and redundancy-ridden PS rules of early work on this range (e.g., Chomsky 1965, Keyser 1968, Ernst 1984). Schematically, the distribution of event-internal adjuncts is shown in (6.1).