No description available.

The distribution of adverbs is particularly difficult to account for, given the amount of variation it encompasses. Not only are adverbs typically optional, but any adverb may also appear in several different positions relative to other constituents, with placement differing according to adverb type and language. As a result, although adverbs are not essential clausal mainstays, the way they are incorporated into the syntax has crucial implications for an overall understanding of clause structure. Some recent accounts of adverb distribution, most notably Cinque (1999), require a highly articulated clausal cartography, where each adverb fits into a specific syntactic position. The placement of adverbs is determined by their semantic properties inasmuch as their specified positions correspond to semantic classes. The ordering of these positions is syntactically predetermined, supposedly with no little or no semantic input. More semantics-based accounts of adverb distribution, as exemplified by Ernst (2002), do not restrict adverbs to specific positions. Rather, any adverb may adjoin to any projection, as long as its individual semantic requirements are satisfied. Such theories of distribution thus depend on adverbs’ semantic interactions with each other and other constituents. The differences between these ‘syntactic’ and ‘semantic’ approaches have led to questions about the nature of verb movement, functional projections, and adjunction. The debate over adverb distribution also raises the issue of what contribution semantics makes to the syntax, and what is syntactically primitive. The aim of this dissertation is to develop an account of adverb distribution that neither requires the introduction of new functional projections, nor attempts to shoehorn an external semantic hierarchy onto a pre-existing syntactic one. It will focus on the position of adverbs in relation to other constituents rather than their order with respect to each other. In this thesis I will review previous theories of adverb distribution, giving special attention to Cinque’s (1999) ‘functional specifier’ approach and Ernst’s (2002) ‘semantic adjunction’ approach, as well as some alternatives, especially the VP-remnant analysis proposed in Nilsen (2003). I will then look at the little-discussed phenomenon of ‘Adverb Climbing’ (AC), in which an adverb precedes a verb that takes an infinitival complement, but is interpreted as modifying the embedded rather than the matrix verb. Taking the varying availability of AC with Control and Raising verbs as a starting point, I will develop a theory of adverb licensing that determines where an adverb may adjoin according to its location in relation to a particular projection. Specifically, I will propose that an adverb must c-command the projection it modifies, and must have access to that projection either in the same phase or at the edge of a lower phase. Based on this analysis I will argue that AC is in fact an indicator of restructuring, and that control and raising verbs take different sizes of infinitival complement. I will also examine the distribution of ‘verb-modifying’ adverbs. Drawing on previous ‘split VP’ proposals (e.g. Ramchand 2008; Travis (2010)), I will contend that the varying distribution of agentive, subject-oriented, and manner adverbs indicates that each is distributed in relation to a different projection within the vP, and that some postverbal adverbs are complements of VP. This proposal will require the introduction of crosslinguistically parameterised restrictions on the order in which adverbs and feature-checking elements may be merged to a single projection. Moreover, I will argue that the array of positions available to agentive adverbs indicates that English has head movement within the vP which bypasses a head, violating Travis’s (1984) Head Movement Constraint (HMC). I will then posit a new analysis of head movement which allows for this violation while still precluding the instances of ungrammaticality that the HMC was meant to rule out. I will finally discuss the distribution of adverbs and negation in the IP range, giving special attention to Pollock’s (1989) classic data from English and French. I will develop an analysis of negation which will allow me to explain the distribution of both sentential adverbs and negation without splitting the IP. Further refinement of the ordering restrictions on multiple merge will also provide an explanation for the ungrammaticality of an adverb between a subject and the highest verb in French, and between do and not in English. This dissertation will serve to situate the study of adverb distributionwithin Chomsky’s (1995) Minimalist framework while providing fresh insight into the extent to which adverb distribution may be used as an indicator of clause structure and movement of other constituents.

No description available.

This thesis presents detailed descriptions of the English adverbial of degree (e.g., very, quite,rather,extremely) and the adverbial of extent (e.g., much, some, at all, excessively).

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Recent studies have begun to redefine the idea of accuracy in second language acquisition to include not only grammatical correctness, but also native-like selection. This is an exploratory study aimed at identifying areas of nonnative-like selection of adverbs, such as sentence position, semantic category preferences, frequency of use and breadth of word choice. Using corpus-linguistic methods it compares the writing of nonnative English speakers at an intermediate and advanced level to both American college students’ writing and published academic writing. It also conducts in-depth case studies of three of the most commonly used adverbs. It finds that while advanced students are grammatically accurate, there are still several ways in which their use of adverbs differs from that of native speakers.

Linguistic research on adverbs has taken many forms: typological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. However, little work has been conducted on adverbs using the tools of quantitative sociolinguistics, and most of that work has focused solely on morphological variation of the -ly suffix. This work addresses the lacuna by examining two adverb phenomena using quantitative variationist methodology. Data come from two large, socially stratified, sociolinguistic corpora of vernacular English. The two corpora contain data collected in Ontario, Canada and in Northern England, and are comprised of the speech of over 150 speakers across all age groups. In the first case study, I examine a claim in usage guides (e.g., Swan 2001) that North American English widely permits pre-auxiliary adverbs in canonical, declarative sentences, while British English prohibits them unless accompanied by contrastive stress. As I show, the varietal differences in speech are not only minimal and unrelated to stress, but instead are highly circumscribed. In addition, I demonstrate that the positioning of adverbs observed here must involve post-syntactic processes. The second case study examines variability in the discourse adverb "actually" and several related adverbials (e.g., "really" and "in fact") and examines the path of grammaticalization (Traugott & Dasher 2002) in the two communities. I demonstrate that Canadians, regardless of sex or education level, prefer the more grammaticalized forms of "actually"; in the UK, the more grammaticalized use is less common, though some young men are leading a shift to the more grammaticalized pattern.

Linguistic research on adverbs has taken many forms: typological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. However, little work has been conducted on adverbs using the tools of quantitative sociolinguistics, and most of that work has focused solely on morphological variation of the -ly suffix. This work addresses the lacuna by examining two adverb phenomena using quantitative variationist methodology. Data come from two large, socially stratified, sociolinguistic corpora of vernacular English. The two corpora contain data collected in Ontario, Canada and in Northern England, and are comprised of the speech of over 150 speakers across all age groups. In the first case study, I examine a claim in usage guides (e.g., Swan 2001) that North American English widely permits pre-auxiliary adverbs in canonical, declarative sentences, while British English prohibits them unless accompanied by contrastive stress. As I show, the varietal differences in speech are not only minimal and unrelated to stress, but instead are highly circumscribed. In addition, I demonstrate that the positioning of adverbs observed here must involve post-syntactic processes. The second case study examines variability in the discourse adverb "actually" and several related adverbials (e.g., "really" and "in fact") and examines the path of grammaticalization (Traugott & Dasher 2002) in the two communities. I demonstrate that Canadians, regardless of sex or education level, prefer the more grammaticalized forms of "actually"; in the UK, the more grammaticalized use is less common, though some young men are leading a shift to the more grammaticalized pattern.

This thesis explores adverb distribution in Iquito, a Zaparoan language spoken byapproximately 25 people in the northern Amazon Basin of Peru. The syntactic distributions of Iquito adverbs correspond to four semantic classes: time, manner,epistemic, and an intensifier. Time adverbs have the broadest distribution, occurring before the topic of a topicalized sentence, between topic and subject, after the verb, and after the object of a transitive sentence. Manner adverbs have a similar distribution, but are not found before topic. Epistemic adverbs have an even narrower distribution, never occurring sentence-initially (whether the sentence is topicalized or not) and rarely occurring between topic and subject. The intensifier adverb has the most restricted distribution, as it only occurs before adjectives or other adverbs. These distributions can be used to classify "atypical" adverbs, namely infinitival verbs that are used adverbially. Furthermore, these distributions shed light on the phrase structure of Iquito. Adverbs are analyzed in the literature as adjuncts, and the allowable positions are explained either as the result of adjunction to different constituents (Ernst 2002; Iatridou 1990) or movement between adjoined positions (Cinque 1999). The pre-verbal positions of Iquito adverbs, particularly in irrealis and negated constructions, raise questions for these analyses. The data demonstrate that adverbs can occupy non-adjoined positions, namely the object position in an irrealis (SOV) construction and possibly negation, forcing a reevaluation of the current treatment of adverbs. The research also expands the existing documentation on Iquito. / text

abstract: Throughout generative syntax, verb movement has been discussed and debated to varying degrees. Syntacticians have attempted to describe this unique form of head movement and its constraints cross-linguistically. Pollock’s (1985, 1997) elaborate comparison of French and English verb movement restrictions has been considered one of the major contributions to the discussion. His analysis has led to the general understanding that auxiliaries are the only variety of verbs in English capable of moving to a higher position in the TP-layer—i.e. the T. In order to prove this claim, Pollock and others (e.g. Roberts 1993, Ernst 2002, Engels 2012, etc.) have examined the placement of other constituents—i.e. adverbs, negation, etc. In terms of adverb placement, Cinque (1999) assigns a position for each adverb in a rigid hierarchy. Claiming the adverbs are in the specifier position, this syntactic representation follows the rich Cartographic framework. I agree that adverbs are base-generated in the specifiers; however, I argue that such a specific ordering of adverbs is rather difficult to justify. Therefore, I adopt the scope-based approach, which groups adverbs into “zones” throughout the TP-layer. By analyzing spoken corpus data, this thesis provides empirical evidence of auxiliary verb movement occurring in Modern English. I argue that, despite being considered optional, English speakers move auxiliaries to the T more frequently, which is consistently indicated by the analysis of adverb placement in the TP-layer. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis English 2017