A multifactorial approach to adverb placement: assumptions, facts, and problems (original) (raw)
Related papers
Adverb placement – convergence of structure and licensing
2000 Theoretical Linguistics 26:95-134.
This contribution addresses the following issues: i) the structural identification of adverb positions (adjoined, embedded or in Spec-positions); ii) interface conditions for adverbs (syntax-semantic interface); iii) serialization patterns of adverbs (post-vs. pre-head order). First, it is argued that important empirical generalizations are missed if adverbials are assigned to spec-positions of functional heads. This paper defends the claim that non-selected adverbials are either adjoined or embedded, depending on the relation to the head of the containing phrase: They are adjoined if they precede the head of the containing phrase. They are embedded if they follow the head of the containing phrase. Second, the relative order of adverbials is characterized as an interface effect of the mapping of syntactic domains on type domains in the structure of the semantic representation. Third, the differences in the pre-and post-head serialization patterns of adverbials that apparently support an adjunction analysis are reconciled with an embedding analysis. Key words: adverb positions; cascading or layered structures; postverbal adjuncts - embedded, not adjoined.
Problems of adverbial placement in learner English and the British National Corpus.
A tricky problem for French learners of English is to know where to put adjuncts in re-lation to the verb, as can be seen in these examples 1 taken from undergraduate essays: NNS11 Another strategy would be to change ?completely the distribution network. NNS19 The Pronunciation Unit has ?as well an important diplomatic role. NNS23 That’s why the advertisers thought about putting ?in the centre a picture of a top model. The primary aim of this paper is to explore the constraints on adjuncts which lead us to interpret these examples as awkward or ungrammatical. A second aim of this pa- per is to explore whether adjuncts occur in free combination in sentences or occur as chunks, parts of longer lexical patterns, on the basis of their behaviour in a corpus of texts, i.e. the British National Corpus. In this paper I use ‘adjunct’ to refer to lexical and grammatical adverbs (such as completely, also) as well as prepositional phrases and other expressions which function as adverbials (e.g. as well, in the centre). The syntactic features of adjunct placement are well documented in the comprehen-sive grammars of English (Jacobson 1964, Quirk et al. 1985. Huddleston and Pullum 2002). Apart from the large number of studies in generative grammar, adjuncts are generally discussed in terms of their placement in the sentence according to such cri- teria as prosodic detachment and thematic structure (Moignet 1961, Nøjgaard 1968, Dulbecco 1999, Van Belle 2000, Carlson et al. 2001). Specific adverbs, such as the specifier only have also been widely studied, because they present problems of semantic scope (Ballert 1977, Risanen 1980, Viitanen 1992, Cairncross 1997, Clement 1998, Frosch 1997, Van Belle 2000). More recently, there have been a handful of studies on adjuncts from a phraseological point of view, for example van der Wouden (1997), who examines collocations of negative polarity, and Lysvåg (1999), who looks at the phraseology of famously, as in the expression to get on famously. As far as I know, there has been no comparative analysis of adjunct positions in English and French from a phraseological perspective, and there has been little or no analysis of adjuncts in terms of contrastive error analysis (Sylviane Granger, personal communication).
Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai. Philologia LXV (4), 2020
This paper focuses on adverbs with an adjectival lexical base in Modern Brazilian Portuguese (=BP). We compare the frequencies of three different types of adverbials: adverbs in -mente (e.g. absolutamente), adjective adverbs (e.g. alto in falar alto ‘speak loudly’) and prepositional phrases of the type “Preposition + Adjective” (e.g. de novo), as they often form groups based on the same root (e.g. primeiramente – primeiro – de primeiro; seriamente – sério – a sério). We compare their type- and token-frequencies in spoken and written BP. The data is based on a scrutiny of the Discurso & Gramática-corpus which consists of oral interviews of 171 informants and their written texts on the same topic as the one in the interviews. Hence, this corpus allows to contrast spoken and written language of the same informants. During the project “Open-Access-Database: Adjective-adverb Interfaces in Romance” (http://gams.uni-graz.at/context:aaif), the corpus was annotated and lemmatized. In total, over 4.000 examples (tokens) of adverbs based on adjectival roots were found in the Discurso & Gramática-corpus. There are 267 different adverbials (types = lemmas), which are based on 221 different base adjectives (lexical roots). The present paper presents a first quantitative analysis of this data, within the framework of a research project on prepositional adverbials. The main findings of the paper, contrasting the three different types of adverbials (adjective-adverbs = AA, adverbs ending in -mente, and prepositional adverbs = PA), are to be found below. In present-day BP, AA are the most frequent in terms of token-frequency, whereas adverbs in -mente are the most frequent in terms of type-frequency. Hence, there is a smaller inventory of highly frequent AA (types) in comparison to a more diversified inventory of less frequently used -mente-adverbs (types). The data shows that -mente is the most productive pattern to form new adverbs based on adjectives (e.g., half of the lexemes occur just once, i.e., only one token). PA-adverbials are less frequent - both in terms of types and tokens - than AA and -mente. Only one PA, de novo, is used in a considerable manner, whereas the other forms are marginal. Regarding the overlapping of adverbials based on the same lexical root (i.e., groups like seriamente – sério – a sério), we observe a tendency towards lexical differentiation in terms of selecting one adverbial-type or another: most lexical roots (base adjectives) appear either as mente-adverbs or as AA. Only regarding the (scarce) PA-adverbials we observe a tendency towards lexical overlapping and possible synonymy: PA occur mostly (79%) in groups with mente-adverbs or AA based on the same adjectival root. Regarding the (relative/normalized) frequencies in spoken and written code, AAs - the most frequent formation type in both subcorpora - are more frequent in the oral corpus than in the written corpus. Mente-adverbs, on the other hand, show a clear preference for the written code: their frequency in the written corpus is twice as high as in the spoken corpus. Code-based variation is most salient for mente-adverbs and the study confirms the prevalence of mente-adverbs in written language. As shown by two examples, speakers may substitute AA such as só and PA such as de novo by mente-adverbs (somente and novamente, respectively) when writing down a story they told before. Both in the written and spoken subcorpora, PA are less frequent than mente-adverbs and AA. Regarding the code, there is no remarkable difference in the case of PA, since they occur almost equally in the oral and the written subcorpus and are only slightly more frequent in the written database. Furthermore, in the context of lexical diversification (i.e., different types = different adjectival roots), most PA-types are used in both subcorpora, whereas mente-adverbs (types) are the most diversified in the written subcorpus and AA (types) in the spoken one. These results indicate that PA form a small inventory of lexicalized forms, which are equally used in written and spoken BP as somewhat ‘neutral’ forms that are not marked for any code.
Revista de Filología y Lingüística de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 2007
Este artículo presenta los resultados de un estudio realizado con un grupo de estudiantes de postgrado seleccionados al azar y otro grupo de profesores de inglés con más de diez años de experiencia en la Escuela de Lenguas Modernas de la Universidad de Costa Rica. El propósito principal de este estudio es determinar si los sujetos podían identificar errores en la posición de los adverbios en algunas oraciones incorrectas y si podían corregirlos en forma satisfactoria. Asimismo, se pretende proveer al profesor de inglés de una serie de reglas y principios que se deben tener presentes para ayudar a los estudiantes a usar el inglés correctamente y así lograr un aprendizaje más efectivo en las clases de inglés.
The syntax and semantics of locating adverbials
Cette étude examine les propriétés des adverbiaux de localisation du français à plusieurs niveaux. La structure syntaxique de ces éléments est décrite de même que les interactions complexes entre position dans la phrase et contribution sémantique. En se focalisant sur la position d'adjoint du syntagme verbal, on montre que le contenu sémantique des marqueurs considérés est mieux saisi par une approche 'relationnelle' que par une approche 'référentielle'. Une sémantique compositionnelle des adverbiaux en position de VP-adjoints est finalement proposée.
Linguistik online, 2018
This paper will address the predicative nature of manner adverb(ial)s and of three types of sentence adverbs (subject-oriented, modal, and evaluative) in Italian. Predication often becomes overt by means of morphological correlates. Is it possible to find any such evidence with invariable adverbs? To unveil their predicative nature, a procedure will be suggested in which two sentences, one with a "-mente" adverb, the other with its cognate adjective (a) share the content morphemes (identity of the signifiant) and (b) entail each other (identity of the signifié as regards semantic roles). A number of such pairs will be discussed, examples of which include: Intelligentemente, Leo intervenne 'Cleverly, Leo intervened' and Leo fu intelligente a intervenire 'Leo was clever to intervene'. We aim to ascertain if the argument structure of the adjective and the semantic role(s) which it assigns can shed light on the very same properties of the cognate adverb.
Integrating Linguistic Dimensions: the scope of adverbs
Proceedings of HPSG07, 2007
Three distinctions seem relevant for the scope properties of adverbs: their function (adjuncts or complements), their prosody (incidental or integrated) and their lexical semantics (parenthetical or non parenthetical). We propose an analysis in which the scope of French adverbs is aligned with their syntactic properties, relying on a view of adjuncts as loci for quantification, a linearization approach to the word order, and an explicit modelling of dialogue.
In (ed.): Corpas Pastor Gloria, Computerised and Corpus-based Approaches to Phraseology: Monolingual and Multilingual Perspectives (Full papers) - Fraseología computacional y basada en corpus: perspectivas monolingües y multilingües (Trabajos completos). Geneva:Editions Tradulex, ISBN: 9782970073659, 2016
This research proposes a theoretical and descriptive study of a set of Italian Multiword Adverbs extracted from a corpus; the corpus-based investigation has been driven simultaneously considering the interaction of distributional and functional properties of selected Multiword Adverbs. In particular, the research deals with prepositional phrases covering an adverbial function and showing a particularly high degree of cohesion between their constituents (Multiword Adverbs-PP), such as: di solito 'usually', a occhio e croce 'more or less', per filo e per segno 'chapter and verse'. The quantitative corpus analysis reveals that this analytical resource is particularly exploited in Italian. The investigation aims at achieving two main objectives. Firstly, the computational analysis reveals to which extent the distribution of Multiword Adverbs-PP may vary depending on their functional properties. Thirdly, the corpus-based investigation gives evidence of subcategories, according to the distributional properties as well as to the functional values of sets of Multiword Adverbs-PP.
A classification of French adverbs based on distributional, syntactic and prosodic criteria
Lingvisticae Investigationes 36 (2), 201-228., 2013
This study explores formal criteria for the classification of adverbs in French. Distributional analysis tests whether adverbs appear in particular morpho-syntactic contexts, including syntactic constructions. It analyses combinations of adverbs, and their relative order in particular syntactic contexts. Finally it tests whether using adverbs in these positions imposes prosodic restrictions. These criteria result in a classification which is compatible with those found in major studies on this topic.
On Adverb Formation in Romanian
2017
The current paper discusses adverb formation in Romanian starting from the treatment of Spanish -mente adverbs in a recent paper by Torner (2005) who introduces the notion of phrasal affix in his treatment of Spanish -mente adverbs. The analysis of the morphology of Romanian adverbs starts from the three suffixes by means of which the language derives its adverbs (-(a)mente, -(ic)eşte, -iş (-îş)) as well as a bounty of adverbs that have been argued (Forăscu 2002) to be adjectival or participial forms. My proposal is that Romanian (manner) adverbs are derived by means of inflectional affixation, with the above mentioned suffixes, or a silent suffix –Ø – the case of those adverbs that have an identical form to that of the masculine singular adjectives, a suffix that encodes the property (in X manner).