Donnerstag, 9.30 Uhr
A long-standing puzzle in the generative literature is the nature of restrictions governing adverb order, as illustrated in contrasts like the following ones:
(1)
a. Probably, Stanley has completely devoured his Wheaties.
a'. Stanley has probably completely devoured his Wheaties.
b. * Stanley has completely probably devoured his Wheaties.
b'. * Completely, Stanley has probably devoured his Wheaties.
At least two recent proposals, those of Alexiadou and Cinque, have taken adverb order to be a direct reflection of clausal structure: different classes of adverbs form AdvPs that are the specifiers of different functional projections, which have a single hierarchical ordering cross-lingustically.
Yet such 'monolithic' approaches to adverb order overlook the substantial results of research on the lexicon and on 'information packaging', which have provided important insights into the distribution of various syntactic constituents. What I wish to argue in this paper, then, is that a 'modular' approach to adverbial order that appeals to such research offers a more adequate account of this order. On this approach, the distribution of adverbs is constrained by properties of phrase structure - including, significantly, the special properties of the 'fronted' position - but more fully determined by the by the argument structure of adverbs, in conjunction with that of verbs and with an interpretative principle of 'coercion'. Such an account also permits the distribution of, for example, negative adverbs to be determined on independent grounds.
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