Two Investigations of Adverbs and Clause Structure in English

138 Pages·2012·4.06 MB·English

by  Erik Zyman

Two Investigations of Adverbs and
Clause Structure in English

Erik Zyman

Senior Thesis (2011-2012)
Princeton University

Advisor: Prof. Edwin Williams
Second Reader: Prof. Robert Freidin
Abstract

This thesis consists of two investigations. In the first, we test the predictions of the
Cinque hierarchy (Cinque 1999) in English by determining whether pairs of adverbs dis-
play the rigid ordering restrictions predicted by the hierarchy to hold universally. The re-
sult is that the Cinque hierarchy makes many incorrect predictions concerning English,
and therefore faces substantial difficulties in accounting for the facts of English adverb
ordering. It is shown that the counterexamples to the Cinque hierarchy cannot be due to
“direct attachment” of the adverbs that occur unexpectedly low, because all the Cinque
adverbs can directly attach to a wide variety of constituents, but not all of them can occur
low enough to disobey Cinquean adverb orders. (It is argued that, in the few cases where
an adverb seems unable to attach to constituents not lying on the clausal spine, this is not
because it is not a “direct attacher,” but because it must be licensed by an element that
only occurs in the extended projection of V.) The second investigation explores the se-
mantic, syntactic, and prosodic characteristics of English “interpretive escape” sentences,
in which an adverb apparently in an embedded clause is interpreted as modifying a higher
clause. An example is John considers Mary - ↑probably a murderer ‘John probably con-
siders Mary a murderer’. An analysis of “escaped” adverbs as parentheticals is argued to
incorrectly predict that adverbs should only be able to semantically escape to the matrix
clause, not to intermediate clauses. It is shown that interpretive escape can occur out of
small clauses, infinitivals, and finite clauses, and even across multiple clause boundaries.
This suggests that it is in principle unbounded, even though it becomes more effortful the
greater the distance it traverses. It can also affect all the Cinque adverbs, with two excep-
tions—almost and retrospective just—which can be explained by appealing to independ-
ently motivated lexical properties of these adverbs. Some tentative suggestions are made
as to what an analysis of interpretive escape may look like. My hope in this thesis is to
have brought to light: 1) a number of empirical difficulties that the Cinque hierarchy
faces in accounting for English, which it should ideally overcome in order to remain a
viable hypothesis; 2) evidence suggesting that perhaps all adverbs can directly attach to
nonspinal constituents; and 3) some characteristics of the phenomenon here dubbed “in-
terpretive escape.”

Keywords: Cinque hierarchy, adverb orders, adverb classes, clause structure, cartogra-
phy, direct attachment, interpretive escape, semantic displacement, prosody

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List of abbreviations used in examples

Adv adverb
ANT anterior tense
DO direct object
EPIST epistemic modality marker
EVID evidential
FUT future
id. idiomatic translation
lit. literal translation
NOM nominative
PASS passive
PERF perfect aspect
PM politeness marker
Q question marker
PROG progressive
PROSP prospective aspect
PST past
semilit. semiliteral translation

Typographical conventions used in example sentences

• Italics indicate the presence of a prominent stress and a High pitch accent.

• SMALL CAPS indicate the most prominent stress and High pitch accent within a par-
ticular prosodic domain.

• Boldfacing has no prosodic meaning, but rather serves to highlight elements of inter-
est in particular examples.
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Overview of contents

I. Introduction
A. General background
B. The Cinque hierarchy
1. The traditional hypothesis: adverbs as adjuncts
2. A problem for the traditional view: adverb ordering restrictions
3. Cinque (1999), part 1: From ordering restrictions and the logic of tran-
sitivity to a hierarchy of adverbs
4. Cinque (1999), part 2: Defending the AdvP-in-Spec Hypothesis
against its alternatives
a. The Extended Projection Hypothesis
b. The Multiple Specs Hypothesis
c. The AdvP-in-Spec Hypothesis
5. Cinque (1999), part 3: Matching the adverb hierarchy to a hierarchy of
functional heads
a. The hierarchy of functional heads
b. Matching the two hierarchies
6. Cinque’s classes of apparent counterexamples
7. A few alternatives to the Cinque hierarchy
8. Summary
C. The project
1. Method
2. A note on the data
II. Testing the predictions of the Cinque hierarchy in English
A. The data
1. Mood ° (honestly) > Mood ° (unfortunately)
speech act evaluative
2. Mood ° (unfortunately) > Mood ° (allegedly)
evaluative evidential
3. Mood ° (allegedly) > Mod ° (probably)
evidential epistemic
4. Mod ° (probably) > T(Past)° (once)
epistemic
5. T(Past)° (once) > T(Future)° (then)
6. T(Future)° (then) > Mod ° (perhaps)
irrealis
7. Excursus: Mod ° (probably) > Mod ° (perhaps, [almost] cer-
epistemic irrealis
tainly)
a. Mod ° (probably) > Mod ° (perhaps)
epistemic irrealis
b. Mod ° (probably) > Mod ° ([almost] certainly)
epistemic irrealis
8. Mod ° (perhaps) > Mod ° ([not] necessarily)
irrealis necessity
9. Mod ° ([not] necessarily) > Mod ° (possibly)
necessity possibility
10. Mod ° (possibly) > Asp ° (usually)
possibility habitual
11. Asp ° (usually) > Asp ° (again)
habitual repetitive(I)
12. Asp ° (again) > Asp ° (often)
repetitive(I) frequentative(I)
13. Excursus: Asp ° (usually) > Asp ° (often)
habitual frequentative(I)
14. Asp ° (often) > Mod ° (intentionally)
frequentative(I) volitional
15. Mod ° (intentionally) > Asp ° (quickly)
volitional celerative(I)
16. Asp ° (quickly) > T(Anterior)° (already)
celerative(I)
17. T(Anterior)° (already) > Asp ° (no longer)
terminative
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18. Asp ° (no longer) > Asp ° (still)
terminative continuative
19. Asp ° (still) > Asp ° (always)
continuative perfect(?)
20. Asp ° (always) > Asp ° (just)
perfect(?) retrospective
21. Asp ° (just) > Asp ° (soon)
retrospective proximative
22. Asp ° (soon) > Asp ° (briefly)
proximative durative
23. Asp ° (briefly) > Asp ° (characteristically)
durative generic/progressive
24. Asp ° (characteristically) > Asp ° (almost)
generic/progressive prospective
25. Asp ° (almost) > Asp ° (completely)
prospective SgCompletive(I)
26. Asp ° (completely) > Voice° (well)
SgCompletive(I)
27. Voice° (well) > Asp ° (fast/early)
celerative(II)
28. Asp ° (fast/early) > Asp ° (again)
celerative(II) repetitive(II)
29. Asp ° (again) > Asp ° (often)
repetitive(II) frequentative(II)
30. Asp ° (often) > Asp ° (completely)
frequentative(II) SgCompletive(II)
31. Domain adverbs > Mood ° (honestly)
speech act
B. Conclusions
C. Discussion
1. A possible explanation: the Direct Attachment Hypothesis
2. Testing the Direct Attachment Hypothesis
a. What nonspinals to use?
b. Data and discussion
c. Why are some of the Cinque adverbs unable to attach to non-
spinals?
d. Conclusions
e. Direct attachment and (or vs.) the Cinque hierarchy
III. When adverbs are interpreted higher than they appear
A. Introduction
1. Semantics and syntax
2. The prosodic characteristics of the inverse scope reading
3. Do the surface scope and inverse scope readings differ in information
structure?
B. Some possible explanations for interpretive escape
1. Escaped adverbs as parentheticals
a. A first attempt
b. A second attempt
2. The two-fragment analysis
3. Summary
C. Testing the limits of interpretive escape
1. Interpretive escape out of small clauses
2. Interpretive escape out of infinitival clauses
3. Interpretive escape out of finite clauses
4. Discussion
a. Summary of findings
b. Interpretive escape and processing effort
c. Interpretive escape across multiple clause boundaries
d. Explaining the counterexamples just and almost
i. Why just and almost cannot be semantically displaced
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ii. Why the just-sentences are worse than the almost-
sentences
D. Toward an account of unusually low adverbs
IV. Conclusion
A. The Cinque hierarchy faces substantial difficulties in accounting for English
adverb orders
B. Findings regarding interpretive escape

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Two Investigtions of Adverbs and Clause Structure in English1

I. Introduction

I.A. General background

At least in generative linguistics, there is a view that modification is one of the least
well understood areas of grammar, and hence deserving of its status as a controversial
topic. This view is expressed by Delfitto (2006:85), who cites a claim by Chomsky
(1995:382, n. 22) that “we still have no good phrase structure theory for such simple mat-
ters as attributive adjectives, relative clauses, and adjuncts of many different types.”2 One
modification-related controversy concerns what exactly the syntactic relation is between
adverbs and the rest of the syntactic tree. Are adverbs adjuncts (the traditional view), or
are they specifiers of dedicated functional projections with specific semantic content, as
argued by Cinque (1999)? This issue is taken up by Wilson and Saygın (2001), Ernst
(2002), Nilsen (2003), Haider (2004), Cinque (2004), and others,3 and will be discussed
in more detail in §I.B.

1I am grateful first and foremost to my advisor, Edwin Williams, for our illuminating discussions and for
his guidance throughout these investigations. I would also like to thank Robert Freidin for kindly agreeing
to be my second reader. For valuable discussion, I am indebted to James Collins, Amy Rose Deal, Michael
Yoshitaka Erlewine, Christiane Fellbaum, Adele Goldberg, Valentine Hacquard, Stephanie Harves, Richard
Kayne, Joshua T. Katz, Jeff Lidz, Salvador Mascarenhas, Mark Norris, Colin Phillips, Norvin Richards,
Anna Tchetchetkine, Anie Thompson, Alexander Williams, Amy Zhou, and Jesse Zymet. None of these
people should be assumed to endorse the material here presented. I would like to thank Michael Yoshitaka
Erlewine for assistance with LaTeXiT. For keeping me company during much of the writing of this thesis,
in an atmosphere of thoroughgoing comradeliness and solidarity, I am deeply grateful to Nick Bellinson,
Derek Gideon, Mitha Nandagopalan, Krithin Sitaram, Alisa Tao, Anna Tchetchetkine, Evan Warner, Lily
Yu, and Amy Zhou. Finally, this thesis would not have been possible if I weren’t fortunate enough to have,
in all things, the unconditional support of my parents, Nancy Carrasco and Samuel Zyman, who have al-
ways been willing to do anything and everything for me. All errors are mine alone. The title of this thesis
was inspired by that of Postal (1998): Three Investigations of Extraction.

2I am grateful to Robert Freidin for reminding me of this quote.
3See also Grohmann (2005:1, 3) and Wenger (2009:2-3, §3), and the list of references at the beginning of
the latter (p. 1). It was through this list that I became aware of several of the works cited in the first para-
graph of the text. For responses to Cinque (1999) that do not deal specifically with what Wenger (2009:1)
calls the “specifier vs. adjunct” debate (cf. (8) herein), see Bobaljik (1999) and Manninen (2005).
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Regardless of whether you agree with the way these researchers frame the issues,
Chomsky and Delfitto are certainly correct in their claims that there is much we do not
yet understand about modification. This is true even of modification structures in English
(presumably the most intensively studied language in modern linguistics)—as should be-
come clear in this thesis, even as we attempt to understand certain modification-related
phenomena better.

I.B. The Cinque hierarchy

The specific subclass4 of modifiers with which we will be concerned is the adverbs.
Multiple hypotheses concerning the syntax of adverbs are being entertained today. One of
them, the Cinque hierarchy (Cinque 1999), will play a central role in our discussion; and
so it will be fitting to describe this hypothesis in detail, starting with the intellectual con-
text in which it arose and the empirical facts that motivated it.

I.B.1. The traditional hypothesis: adverbs as adjuncts

The traditional view regarding the syntax of adverbs is that these elements are ad-
juncts, and consequently their placement is relatively free. At least at first glance, this
certainly appears to be borne out by facts from English:
(1)00 a. *‘Carefully, Ashley picked up the wounded bird.
b. *‘Ashley carefully picked up the wounded bird.
c. *‘Ashley picked up the wounded bird carefully.

On the ADJUNCTION HYPOTHESIS, as I will call it, these sentences fundamentally have the
structures in (2a-c), respectively. These diagrams are drawn in accordance with the “old-

4This wording is not meant to imply a commitment to the hypothesis that Adv(erb) is a primitive category,
although it seems plausible that this is in fact the case at least for familiar languages like English (see
Delfitto 2006:86-89, §2; Pullum 2010, §3.2.4). Whether it is or not, though certainly an interesting ques-
tion, will be largely orthogonal to our aims here.
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school” phrase structure rule S → NP VP, which most generative linguists today would
reject.5 I do this here to avoid certain complications that immediately arise in a strictly
endocentric framework (with IP or TP instead of S, etc.). These concern what exactly the
adverbs are attached to, and are irrelevant to the illustration of adjunction.
(2)00 a. S
AdvP S
carefully
*‘ Ashley picked up the wounded bird

b. S
NP VP
Ashley
AdvP VP
carefully
*‘ picked up the wounded bird

c. S
NP VP
Ashley
VP AdvP
carefully
*‘ picked up the wounded bird

To recapitulate, the picture of adverb syntax we have so far is one in which the fol-
lowing hold:

5The trees also gloss over the issue of the exact label of the constituent Ashley and treat it as an NP for sim-
plicity.
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(3)00 a. *‘There is a class of words (“adverbs”) belonging to the category Adv, which
*‘includes carefully, slowly, well, …
b. *‘Adverbs are incorporated into the tree by adjunction.
c. *‘Adverbs may adjoin to S or VP, at least.

I.B.2. A problem for the traditional view: adverb ordering restrictions

Now, it is clear that (3) is not even remotely the end of the story. One problem with
the view in (3) is that certain adverbs display ordering restrictions, which nothing in (3)
predicts. Consider the following Italian data from Cinque (1999).
In this language, già ‘already’ and più ‘any longer’ can only cooccur in that order:6
(4)00 a. *‘All’ epoca non possedeva già più nulla.
*‘at+the time not possessed already any.longer nothing
*‘semilit. ‘At the time (s)he did not possess already any longer anything.’
*‘id.7 ‘At the time, (s)he already didn’t own anything any longer.’

(Cinque 1999:5, (5a))

(4)00 b. ‘*All’ epoca non possedeva più già nulla.
*‘at+the time not possessed any.longer already nothing
(ibid:5, (5b))

Più ‘any longer’, for its part, obligatorily precedes sempre ‘always’:

(5)00 a. *‘Da allora, non ha più sempre vinto.
*’from then not has any.longer always won
*‘semilit. ‘Since then, he has no longer always won.’
*’id.‘Since then, he hasn’t always won anymore.’ (ibid:6, (11a))

(4)00 b. ‘*Da allora, non ha sempre più vinto.
*‘from then not has always any.longer won (ibid:6, (11b))

6In other words, these two adverbs can only cooccur in the order già…più, not *più…già. I will often de-
scribe such ordering restrictions by saying “A precedes B” or “A obligatorily precedes B.” Such restrictions
will only have visible effects when A and B actually cooccur in the same clause or subclausal structure.
The aforementioned wordings are not meant to imply that A requires the presence of B or vice versa. In
fact, this should be assumed not to be the case unless indicated otherwise.
7Cinque (1999) often departs from standard practice by providing neither a literal gloss nor a perfectly
idiomatic translation, but merely a single line that falls somewhere in between the two (cf. Manninen
2005:457). This is an English sentence that is sometimes stilted or even ill formed, owing to the desire to at
least approximate the word order and other characteristics of the original. When citing such examples from
Cinque, I have adapted them to the standard format (example, literal gloss, idiomatic translation). Semil-
iteral (“semilit.”) translations are Cinque’s; the fully idiomatic (“id.”) translations are generally mine.
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