Introduction

The Main Goal

Nobody seems to know exactly what to do with adverbs. The literature of the last 30 years in formal syntax and semantics is peppered with analyses of the distribution or interpretation (or both) of small classes of adverbs but has few attempts at an overall theory; there have been popular proposals for other phenomena based crucially on assumptions about adverbial syntax that have little or no foundation; and almost everyone who has looked at the overall landscape has felt obliged to observe what a swamp it is. The situation for the larger class of adverbials, including PPs, CPs, and other adverb-like phrases, is yet more complex and difficult. This book is intended as a response – an attempt to formulate a comprehensive theory of the distribution of adverbial adjuncts, one based on a wide range of data from the majority of semantic types of adverbials, culled from a large and diverse range of languages, and focused on accounting for the major distributional facts by means of a relatively small number of general principles, most of which are already necessary to account for other areas of syntax. Within this framework there are several specific goals.

Specific Goals

Base Positions and Licensing

When formal grammars standardly included Phrase Structure rules of the sort elaborated by Chomsky (1965) and other scholars of the 1960s, the free distribution of adverbs like stupidly or quickly, shown in (1.1)–(1.2), created an obvious problem: one needed rules like those shown in (1.3) to express their distribution.