Abstract
In this work, we report a new interaction pattern among adverb classes in the context of movement and examine the implications of this pattern with respect to Rizzi’s (1990, 2001) Relativized Minimality, Chomsky’s (1995) Minimal Link Condition, and Ernst’s (2002) Fact-Event Object Calculus. In Sect. 1, we review the relevant data in the literature. Our new contribution is reported in Sect. 2 using wh-movement and four sample adverb classes. Section 3 shows that the pattern holds for various other types of movement as well (neutral preposing, focalization, and clefting in English; scrambling in Russian). We also discuss the behavior of NPs, PPs, and verbal heads here. Section 4 focuses on the theoretical significance of the new facts. In Appendix A, we provide a more comprehensive demonstration of how various adverb classes obey the pattern established in Sects. 2–3. Appendix B is an actual sample of the verbal context we presented to our informants for soliciting subtle data.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Alexiadou, Artemis. 1997. Adverb placement: A case study in antisymmetric syntax. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Barrs, Andrew, and Howard Lasnik. 1986. A note on anaphora and double objects. Linguistic Inquiry 17: 347–354.
Bowers, John. 1993. The syntax of predication. Linguistic Inquiry 24: 591–656.
Chomsky, Noam. 1977. On Wh-movement. In Formal syntax, eds. Peter Culicover, Thomas Wasow, and Adrian Akmajian, 71–132. New York: Academic Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris.
Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and functional heads: A cross-linguistic perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 2004. Issues in adverbial syntax. Lingua 114: 683–710.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 2006. Complement and adverbial PPs: Implications for clause structure. In Restructuring and functional heads: The cartography of syntactic structures, Vol. 4, 145–166. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ernst, Thomas. 2002. The syntax of adjuncts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ernst, Thomas. 2007. On the role of semantics in a theory of adverb syntax. Lingua 117: 1008–1033.
Ernst, Thomas. 2009. Speaker-oriented adverbs. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 27: 497–544.
Frey, Warner. 2003. Syntactic conditions on adjunct classes. In Modifying adjuncts, eds. Ewald Lang, Claudia Maienborn, and Fabricius-Hansen Cathrine, 163–209. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Fukui, Naoki, and Yuji Takano. 1998. Symmetry in syntax: Merge and demerge. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 7: 27–86.
Haider, Hubert, and Martin Prinzhorn. 1986. Verb second phenomena in Germanic languages. Dordrecht: Foris.
Heim, Irene. 1982. The semantics of definite and indefinite noun phrases. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Jackendoff, Ray. 1972. Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Katz, Jerrold, and Paul Postal. 1964. An integrated theory of linguistic descriptions. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kayne, Richard. 1994. The antisymmetry of syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Koster, Jan. 1978. Locality principles in syntax. Dordrecht: Foris.
Laenzlinger, Christopher. 1998. Comparative studies in word order variation: Adverbs, pronouns, and clause structure in Romance and Germanic. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Laenzlinger, Christopher. 2004. The feature-based theory of adverb syntax. In Adverbials: The interplay between meaning, context and syntactic structure, eds. Jennifer R. Austin, Stefan Engelberg, and Gisa Rauh, 205–252. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Lasnik, Howard, and Mamoru Saito. 1993. Move-α. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lewis, David. 1975. Adverbs of quantification. In Formal semantics of natural language, ed. Edward Keenan, 3–15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Li, Yafei. 1990. Conditions on X0-movement. PhD dissertation, MIT, Cambridge.
Li, Yafei. 1997. An optimized UG and biological redundancies. Linguistic Inquiry 28: 170–178.
Li, Yafei. 2005. X 0 : A theory of the morphology-syntax interface. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lonzi, Lidia. 1991. Il sintagma avverbiale. In Grande grammatical Italiana di consultazione, Vol. 2, eds. Lorenzo Renzi and Giampaolo Salvi, 342–412. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Moro, Andrea. 2000. Dynamic Antisymmetry. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Rivero, Maria-Luisa. 1991. Long head-movement and negation: Serbo-Croation vs. Slovak and Czech. The Linguistic Review 8: 319–351.
Rizzi, Luigi. 1990. Relativized minimality. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Rizzi, Luigi. 2001. Relativized minimality effects. In The handbook of contemporary syntactic theory, eds. Mark Baltin and Chris Collins, 89–110. Oxford: Blackwell.
Rizzi, Luigi. 2005. Locality and left periphery. In Structures and beyond: Volume 3: The cartography of syntactic structures, ed. Adriana Belletti, 223–251. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Roberts, Ian. 2001. Head movement. In The handbook of contemporary syntactic theory, eds. Mark Baltin and Chris Collins, 113–147. Oxford: Blackwell.
Shields, Rebecca. 2009. Intervention and rescue: Arguments for representational constraints on syntactic dependencies. PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin.
Shields, Rebecca. In progress. Modal repair and quantifier restriction: Epistemic adverbs in C operator clauses. University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Schlyter, Suzanne. 1974. Une hiérarchie d’adverbes et leur distribution—par quelle transformation. In Actes du colloque Franco-Allemand de grammaire transformationnelle, Vol. II, eds. Christian Rohrer and Nicholas Ruwet, 76–84. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Travis, Lisa. 1988. The syntax of adverbs. McGill Working Papers in Linguistics/Cahiers linguistiques de McGill, Special Issue May: 280–310.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Li, Y., Shields, R. & Lin, V. Adverb classes and the nature of minimality. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 30, 217–260 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-011-9158-9
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-011-9158-9