A Syntax for Adverbs

In his 1972 monograph Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar, Ray Jackendoff begins the chapter on adverbs saying, “the adverb is perhaps the least studied and most maligned part of speech, . . . maltreated beyond the call of duty”. Twenty-five years later the analysis of adverbs continues to receive relatively little attention in the linguistic literature (notable exceptions include Ernst 1984, Alexiadou 1994, and Cinque 1998). This is surprising given that adverb placement is extremely widely used as a probe on syntactic structure. Such diagnostics, it has been pointed out however, can be misleading and/or inaccurate, precisely because a comprehensive theory of adverb position is not available (Iatridou 1990, Bobaljik and Jonas 1996, Collins and Thrainsson 1996). This paper is a contribution towards addressing this situation. Using English adverb placement and a conservative conception of English clause structure, it develops a theory of adverb syntax. The paper is organized as follows. Section 1 proposes a structural description for the distribution Sand VP-adverbs in English, following observations in Jackendoff 1972. Section 2 provides a theoretical basis for the proposal. The fundamental idea is that a given adverb class is structurally licensed by one or more heads in a definable domain. Where in a structure a particular adverb may appear is thus sharply restricted. The analysis accounts for the distribution of Jackendoff’s adverb classes as well as additional classes in English. Section 3 closes with an indication of some further issues for the proposal.