Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T02:10:53.906Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Non-ly adverbs in preverbal position: the case of fast

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2014

WOJCIECH GUZ
WOJCIECH GUZ*
Affiliation:
English Department, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Al. Racławickie 14, 20–950 Lublin, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

English adverbs are often classified according to the range of positions that are available to them. One such group includes items which allegedly can only occupy the VP-final position. These are typically non-ly adverbs such as hard, well and fast. However, although counterexamples to this claim can be found in corpora, few attempts have been made to reconsider the distributional characteristics of these adverbs. This article therefore offers a corpus-based analysis of the adverb fast, whose preverbal occurrence has so far been largely ignored. The analysis seeks to establish the extent – expressed quantitatively – to which fast is found in this position. We also explore the typical contexts of preverbal fast and investigate factors which may be responsible for the variation between preverbal and postverbal positions. We show that the nature of these factors may be genre-related, lexico-grammatical, syntactic, semantic or pragmatic, and that adverb position may be determined by a combination of these factors.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 133 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adger, David & Tsoulas, George. 2004. Circumstantial adverbs and aspect. In Austin, Jennifer R., Engelberg, Stefan & Rauh, Gisa (eds.), Adverbials: The interplay between meaning, context and syntactic structure, 45–66. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Aijmer, Karin & Altenberg, Bengt (eds.). 1991. English corpus linguistics. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Alexiadou, Artemis. 1994. Issues in the syntax of adverbs. PhD dissertation, University of Potsdam.Google Scholar
Alexiadou, Artemis. 1997. Adverb placement: A case study in antisymmetric syntax. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Baayen, Harald & Lieber, Rochelle. 1991. Productivity and English derivation: A corpus-based study. Linguistics 29 (4), 801–44.Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight. 1943. The position of the adverb in English – a convenient analogy to the position of the adjective in Spanish. Hispania 26 (2), 191–2.Google Scholar
Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and functional heads: A cross-linguistic perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2004–. BYU-BNC. (Based on the British National Corpus from Oxford University Press). Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/.Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2007–. TIME Magazine Corpus: 100 million words, 1920s-2000s. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/time/.Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2008–. The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990-present. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.Google Scholar
Diessel, Holger. 2005. Competing motivations for the ordering of main and adverbial clauses. Linguistics 43 (3), 449–70.Google Scholar
Ernst, Thomas. 1984. Towards an integrated theory of adverb position in English. PhD dissertation, Indiana University.Google Scholar
Ernst, Thomas. 2002. The syntax of adjuncts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Eszes, Boldizsar. 2009. Aspect and adverb interpretation – the case of quickly. In Kiss, Katalin E. (ed.), Adverbs and adverbial adjuncts at the interfaces, 269–96. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Fabricius-Hansen, Cathrine, Lang, Ewald & Maienborn, Claudia (eds.). 2000. Approaching the grammar of adjuncts: Proceedings of the Oslo Conference. ZAS Papers in Linguistics (ZASPiL) 17.Google Scholar
Firbas, Jan. 1966. On defining the theme in functional sentence perspective. Travaux Linguistiques de Prague 1, 267–80.Google Scholar
Gibson, Edward. 2000. The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity. In Marantz, Alec, Miyashita, Yasushi & O'Neil, Wayne (eds.), Image, language, brain, 95–126. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Göbbel, Edward. 2007. Focus and marked positions for VP adverbs. In Winkler, Susanne & Schwabe, Kerstin (eds.), On information structure, meaning and form, 275–300. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K. 1991. Corpus studies and probabilistic grammar. In Aijmer & Altenberg (eds.), 30–43.Google Scholar
Haumann, Dagmar. 2007. Adverb licensing and clause structure in English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John. 2004. Efficiency and complexity in grammars. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Huang, Shuan-Fan. 1975. A study of adverbs. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Hunston, Susan & Francis, Gill. 2000. Pattern grammar: A corpus-driven approach to the lexical grammar of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, Ray. 1972. Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jacobson, Sven. 1978. On the use, meaning, and syntax of English preverbal adverbs. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.Google Scholar
Klima, Edward S. 1965. Studies in diachronic syntax. PhD dissertation, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey. 1991. The state of the art in corpus linguistics. In Aijmer & Altenberg (eds.), 8–29.Google Scholar
O'Keeffe, Anne, McCarthy, Michael & Carter, Ronald. 2007. From corpus to classroom: Language use and language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pittner, Karen. 2000. Position and interpretation of adjuncts: Process, event, and wieder ‘again’. In Fabricius-Hansen, Lang & Maienborn (eds.), 203–16.Google Scholar
Plag, Ingo. 1999. Morphological productivity. Structural constraints in English derivation. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Schäfer, Martin. 2001. Pure manner adverbs. In Dölling, Johannes & Zybatow, Tatjana (eds.), Ereignisstrukturen: Linguistische Arbeitsberichte 76, 251–72. Universität Leipzig.Google Scholar
Shaer, Benjamin. 2000. Syntactic position and the ‘reading’ of manner adverbs. In Fabricius-Hansen, Lang & Maienborn (eds.), 265–86.Google Scholar
Stallings, Lynne M. & MacDonald, Maryellen C.. 1998. Phrasal ordering constraints in sentence production: Phrase length and verb disposition in heavy-NP shift. Journal of Memory and Language 39, 392–417.Google Scholar
Thomason, Richmond & Stalnaker, Robert. 1973. A semantic theory of adverbs. Linguistic Inquiry 4 (2), 195–220.Google Scholar
Trask, R. L. 2007. Language and linguistics. The key concepts, 2nd edition. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Travis, Lisa. 1988. The syntax of adverbs. McGill Working Papers in Linguistics: Special issue on comparative Germanic syntax, 280–310.Google Scholar