The Distribution of Adverbial Phrases in English (original) (raw)

English sentence adverbials: Their syntax and their intonation in British English

Lingua, 1974

'ihe probiems of isoiating sentence adverbiais as a class are discussed. An attempt is then trade to subcaiegorise adverbials to take account of their trans.ormational relations and other sj ntactic characteristics. The intonation of English sentence adverbials is then considered with sibecid reference to sentence-initial position. It is found thiat there are correlations between i! tonation and syntactic class; and tnat other factors conditioning choice of intonation include: tI\e inherent semantics of the adverb; whether it modifies a sentence containing "new" or " :iven" information; and the attitude of the speaker. The interaction of these various factors is cl>nsidered in some detail. The findings are tested against informant reaction tests. Syntax We began this piece of work' by asking ourselves what factors cr,~tribute to the selection of the appropriate British English intonation for a given sentence adverbial. It soon became clear that, although other factors were involved, the question of which syntactic subclass the adverbial belonged to was a prime factor, and that it was necessary to examine the syntax of the adverbia sand thus also their semanticsin detail. Iln this first section we carry out this syntactic-semantic examination; in the second section we examine some aspects of the intonation of the adverbials in the light of our syntactic findings. By an ADVERBIAL we wish to denote any 'adjunct' or modifier uzd in a non-adjectival way. An adverbial may be a simple lexical item of the class ADVERB like perhaps or lzere; alternatively it may be of the structure ADJECTIVE (+-ly); or (PREPOSITION+) NOUN 1 We are indebted to D.A. Cruse for a number of valuable suggestions and comments. We are also grateful to our other department colleagues for their comments ai; willingness to act as informants. 2 D.J. AIlerton and A. Outtenden, English sentence a-'verbials PIIRASE; or PREPOSITION (+NOUN PHRASE) e.g. fast, Zoud(Zy), carefully; last night, (uuring) tnis qfternoon, in the evening, after (the meeting). We shall concentrate our attention on one word adverbs rather than adverbial phrases, i.e. on the first two types listed above. Our concern here is sentence adverbials, and wz must first isolate these as a class. Several tests have been proposed for a sentence adverbial. One is that sentence adverbials are adverbials formed from adjectives which can take an abstract subject nominal (Schreiber 1971) e.g., The idea was unforth late. This will obviously not cover adverbials which are not derived from adjectives (though a deep structure could of course be arrazged co that this were so in every case). Nor does it cover by arry means all classes of sentence adverb, e.g. the types exemplified by frankly, bri$!y, linguistically. More realistically, they may be defined according to criteria of transformation, co-occurrence, position and intonation (see A!!ertoni fort!!coming). It will prove most fruitful to take transformational potential as the most reliable guide both for identifying sentence as a class and for determining their subc!asses, and we develop this fully below. As regards co-occurrence, sentence adverbials are neutral, whereas manner and time adverbials for example have co-occurrence restrictions with the lexical verb and the auxiliary respectively. Four different positions within the sentence may be taken by most' sentence adverbs: initial; medial before the auxiliary; medial after the auxiliary but before the lexical verb; final position, e.g. Probably John was hurt. John probably was hu.rt. John was probably hurt. John was hurt, probably. The distinction between the two medial positions is of course neutralized if no auxiliary is present, e.g. John probably hurt himself. Many non-sentence adverbs, on the other hand, are restricted in their occurrence in these positions, e.g. degree adverbs like slightly may occur only before the lexical verb, or finally, cf.: * S!ightly John was hurt. * John slightly was hurt. John was slightly hurt. John was hurt slightly.

An analysis of adverbs in appositives

This paper presents an investigation into the functional structure of appositives. Taking hierarchy of adverbs and functional categories as a point of departure, the analysis shows that all but one of Cinque's adverb classes can be found in appositives. The exception concerns speech act adverbs. Because appositives are non-finite, they lack phi features, resulting in an inability to represent discourse roles such as Speaker. Speech act adverbs obligatorily select Speaker as an argument, accounting for their failure to appear in non-finite structures such as appositives.