Adverbs And Adverbial Adjuncts At The Interfaces

This series consists of collected volumes and monographs about specific issues dealing with interfaces among the subcomponents of linguistic structure: phonology-morphology, phonology-syntax, syntax-semantics, syntax-morphology, and syntax-lexicon. Recent linguistic research has recognized that the subcomponents of grammar interact in non-trivial ways. What is currently under debate is the actual range of such interactions and their most appropriate representation in grammar, and this is precisely the focus of this series. Specifically, it provides a general overview of various topics by examining them through the interaction of grammatical components. The books function as a state-of- the-art report of research.

This book proposes a theory of the distribution of adverbial adjuncts in a Principles and Parameters framework, claiming that there are few syntactic principles specific to adverbials; rather, for the most part, adverbials adjoin freely to any projection. Adjuncts' possible hierarchical positions are determined by whether they can receive a proper interpretation, according to their selectional (including scope) requirements and general compositional rules, while linear order is determined by hierarchical position along with a system of directionality principles and morphological weight, both of which apply generally to adjuncts and all other syntactic elements. A wide range of adverbial types is analysed; predicational adverbs (such as manner, and modal adverbs), domain expressions like financially, temporal, frequency, duration and focusing adverbials; participant PPs (e.g. locatives and benefactives); resultative and conditional clauses, and others, taken primarily from English, Chinese, French and Italian, with occasional reference to others (such as German and Japanese).

The study of syntax over the last half century has seen a remarkable expansion of the boundaries of human knowledge about the structure of natural language. The Routledge Handbook of Syntax presents a comprehensive survey of the major theoretical and empirical advances in the dynamically evolving field of syntax from a variety of perspectives, both within the dominant generative paradigm and between syntacticians working within generative grammar and those working in functionalist and related approaches. The handbook covers key issues within the field that include: • core areas of syntactic empirical investigation, • contemporary approaches to syntactic theory, • interfaces of syntax with other components of the human language system, • experimental and computational approaches to syntax. Bringing together renowned linguistic scientists and cutting-edge scholars from across the discipline and providing a balanced yet comprehensive overview of the field, the Routledge Handbook of Syntax is essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students working in syntactic theory.

Unlike the notion of "argument" that is central to modern linguistic theorizing, the phenomena that are commonly subsumed under the complementary notion "adjunct" so far have not attracted the attention they deserve. In this volume, leading experts in the field present current approaches to the grammar and pragmatics of adjuncts. The contributions scrutinize i.a. the argument-adjunct distinction, specify conditions of adjunct placement, discuss compositionality issues, and propose new analyses of event-related modification. They are meant to shed new light on an area of linguistic structure that is deemed to be notoriously overlooked.

Adverbials have become an important testing ground for research on the interfaces between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The articles selected for this volume present recent research on this topic. Among the issues addressed are the occurrence of adverbials in various domains of the sentence Mittelfeld, left and right periphery, adverbials in front of gaps, and the influence of the discourse context on the interpretation and position of adverbials. Particular classes of adverbials that are discussed include domain, locative, temporal, manner, transparent, and degree adverbials. Beyond the exploration of these topics, the volume reflects the current debate between proponents of semantic-driven approaches to the positioning of adverbials which assume adverbials to be adjuncts and approaches that claim a primacy of syntax in conceiving of adverbials as specifiers in a universally valid hierarchy of functional projections.

Within the current discussion on grammatical interfaces, the word-classes of adjective and adverb are of particular interest because they appear to be separated or joined in manifold ways at the level of word-class or syntax, with morphology playing a prominent role, especially in Romance. The volume provides typological and theoretical insights into the common or different usage of adjectives and adverbs in Romance. Diachronic change is discussed alongside with synchronic variation and the representation in grammar. The discussion turns out to be controversial, calling into question traditional assumptions such as the dogma of the invariability and the categorial status of the adverb.

In this original study, Hilde Hasselgård discusses the use of adverbials in English, through examining examples found in everyday texts. Adverbials - clause elements that typically refer to circumstances of time, space, reason and manner - cover a range of meanings and can be placed at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a sentence. The description of the frequency of meaning types and discussion of the reasons for selecting positions show that the use of adverbials differs across text types. Adverbial usage is often linked to the general build-up of a text and part of its content and purpose. In using real texts, Hasselgård identifies a challenge for the classification of adjuncts, and also highlights that some adjuncts have uses that extend into the textual and interpersonal domains, obscuring the traditional divisions between adjuncts, disjuncts and conjuncts.

This is the third volume in the series Within Language, Beyond Theories, which focuses on current linguistic research that surpasses the limits of contemporary theoretical frameworks in order to gain new insights into the structure of the language system and to offer more explanatorily adequate accounts of linguistic phenomena taken from a number of the world’s languages. This book offers a collection of fourteen chapters organized into three parts and serves as a vehicle for the survey of new voices in discourse analysis, pragmatics and corpus-based studies. Part I addresses a panorama of topics related to different discourse types, such as talk show discourse, multimodal discourse, and everyday spoken discourse, as well as written academic discourse. Part II covers a range of highly controversial issues in pragmatics, including the status of ad-hoc concepts, linguistically encoded meaning, explicit content, and the lexicographic treatment of modality. Part III encompasses chapters which offer an overview of some of the recent phenomena covered in the area of corpus-based research, including the semantic functions of the temporal meanings of selected prepositions; the diffusion of gerundive complements; the institutionalization and de-institutionalization of neologisms; contextual factors in the placement of the adverb “well”; the behaviour of the verb “bake” in copular constructions; the syntactic flexibility of English idioms and their thematic composition; tendencies in the formation of nouns in tabloids; and the application of cluster analysis to the categorization of linguistic data. Drawing on recent advances in discourse analysis, pragmatics and corpus-based studies, the majority of the issues discussed here are approached and investigated from a dual perspective. While on the theoretical side, an array of different theoretical models is surveyed, in the analytical parts, the practical applications of the models examined are tested against data from English (both British and American), Estonian and Polish. The wide range of theoretical and empirical issues discussed in this book will help to provoke further academic discussion on the study of language in the areas of discourse analysis, pragmatics, and corpus-based research.