Review of Hilde Hasselgård (2010), Adjunct Adverbials in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (original) (raw)

Reviewed by Bernd Kortmann, University of Freiburg "Adverbials may be regarded as a ragbag category in the linguistics system." It is hard to think of anyone who might want to take issue with the opening statement of the monograph under review. In fact, it is hard to think of any domain of grammar (not only English grammar) which is messier than the one of adverbials. For this reason alone anyone who volunteers to tackle the Herculean task of writing a(nother) comprehensive book on the by far largest subgroup of adverbials, namely adjuncts, must be admired for their courage and stamina. It must be someone who has explored the territory for a long time and acquired intimate knowledge, which is indeed the case for Hilda Hasselgård, who in 1996 published a first monograph on the two largest semantic classes of adverbials, more exactly on Where and When: Positional and Functional Conventions for Sequences of Time and Space Adverbials in Present-Day English (see references). Hasselgård's new book stands in the tradition of Greenbaum's seminal Studies in English Adverbial Usage (1969) and its successor publications (in Quirk et al. 1972 and 1985, with the relevant chapters in both pillars of English reference grammars having been authored by Sidney Greenbaum, and in Biber et al. 1999) and truly complements Greenbaum's 1969 classic by focussing on adjuncts. While Greenbaum was solely concerned with linking adverbs, i.e. conjuncts and disjuncts, Hasselgård restricts her study to adjuncts, including under this heading, following Biber et al. 1999, "all time and degree adverbials along with focus and viewpoint adverbials" (p. 23), i.e. adverbials classified as subjuncts in Quirk et al. (1985). The overall approach Hasselgård adopts is one that is descriptive, broadly functional and more (but not too) narrowly Hallidayan, which is reflected among other things by her usage-in-text/discourse perspective on adjuncts (notably their use on the textual and interpersonal levels of communication). This perspective is also prominently stated in the cover blurb, where, besides pointing to usage differences of adverbials across text types, the reader is informed as follows: "In using real texts, Hasselgård identifies a challenge for the classification of adjuncts, and also highlights the fact that some adjuncts have uses that extend into the textual and interpersonal domains, obscuring the traditional divisions between adjuncts, disjuncts and conjuncts." The volume comprises almost exactly 300 text pages and is organized into four parts with altogether 13 chapters. Part I (3-63) outlines the overall framework for Hasselgård's take on the field of adverbials, in general, and adjuncts, in particular. It offers the expectable background information concerning the major research questions, materials and methods, and organisation of the book (Chapter 1) and an overview of the classifications of adverbials as discussed in the literature (Chapter 2). In Chapter 3 the focus is on the syntactic positions of adverbials in clauses and sentences (essentially, initial, medial, end position) and the semantics, especially the semantic scope, of adverbials (in general and depending on their position). Part II (67-183) is concerned with the positions of adverbials. It consists of five chapters, the first three of which address adverbials in initial, medial and end position respectively (Chapters 4-6). Chapter 7 is exclusively concerned with (it-) cleft focus position of adjuncts and Chapter 8 with the combination of adjuncts and, especially, combination of their positions. The overarching topic of Part III (187-256) is semantics, more exactly subtypes, frequencies and usage of different semantic types of adjuncts (adjuncts of time and space in Chapter 9, of manner and contingency in Chapter 10, and of respect, focus, degree, etc. in Chapter 11). The synoptic Part IV (259-305) draws together the major findings from