Introduction

The AuxRange, the area between subjects and main verbs in VO languages, has traditionally attracted the most attention in research on adverbs, undoubtedly because it is the only place many common adverbs (and negation) may occur in the familiar European languages, because it is where ambiguities show up most clearly, and because it is only here that obvious interactions between adverbs and auxiliary verbs take place. Thus the early writers on adverbs in the generative syntactic tradition made it a major focus (e.g., Keyser 1968, Jackendoff 1972, Ernst 1984), and those who were interested in the behavior of auxiliaries and/or negation have also had to assume or propose some analysis of these elements (Baker 1971, 1981, Emonds 1976, Sag 1980). More recently, adverbs have become a common diagnostic (a) for head movement, the central theoretical issue in the AuxRange in current Principles and Parameters (P&P) theory (Platzack 1986, Pollock 1989, and many others), and (b) for various proposals for alternative subject positions (Bobaljik and Jonas 1996 and many others). Thus it has become increasingly important for there to be a coherent theory of adverb licensing.

The goal of this chapter is to establish that the principles developed in earlier chapters can account for a wide range of data in the AuxRange. In particular, this approach holds that the main syntactic constraints on free-adjunction are the Directionality Principles and, to a lesser extent, Weight theory.