Syntax and Semantics of Adverbs

Syntax and Semantics of Adverbs

This paper aims to give a syntactic-semantic explanation to the distribution of adverbs in English. Adverbs in English appear to have free distribution within a sentence and some previous linguists claim that the free distribution of adverbs follow from the adverb movement. Based on the data of meaning difference and subcategorization, this paper argues that adverbs do not move and further shows that the distribution of adverbs are in fact very restricted as observed in Jackendoff (1972), Travis(1988), and Cinque(1999). The relative sequencing of adverbs is also strictly fixed. Cinque's mechanism to capture the relative sequencing effect costs too much syntactically since it requires a highly complicated clause structure, i.e., too many articulated functional projections. This paper suggests that the distribution of adverbs can best be captured by a syntactic-semantic approach, more specifically an approach based on the semantic scope relation, the mapping hypothesis, and the phase theory (Chomsky 2000).