Stefanie Bode - Casting a Minimalist Eye on Adjuncts

I thank the following copyright holders and the authors for granting permission to reprint quotes used for argumentation: Cambridge University Press, Columbia University Press, De Gruyter, Elsevier, John Benamins, Oxford University Press, Peter Lang GmbH, Routledge, John Bowers, and Balazs Surnyi. I am also grateful for the helpful open access policy of many publishers and MITs general copyright strategy concerning reprinting smaller quotes. I am basically indebted to every author referred to, and especially to those whose works I discuss in the book. They share the deep interest in the Minimalist Program and contributed to this book. A project like this would not be possible without them. Thanks also to my publisher, Routledge, for giving me the opportunity to present my ideas on adjuncts. On a personal note, I want to thank Elysse Preposi (Editor, Linguistics), Helena Parkinson (Editorial Assistant), Eleni Steck (Production Editor), and Ramachandran Vijayaraghavan (Project Manager) for their help. I also thank two reviewers for their helpful suggestions. I thank my family for supporting me and being there for me. Eventually, I want to express my deepest gratitude to Daniel Seely, for his invaluable comments and encouragement.

Why study adjuncts today? Recent minimalist discussion elaborates on the architecture of the grammar and raises such questions as: what is part of narrow syntax or what belongs to the interfaces SEM and PHON? There is a lot of discussion in the generative approach to syntax and, broadly speaking, minimalism splits into two opposing views. Either syntax is taken to be deterministic, leading to a crash-proof situation at the interfaces, or syntax is basically free, and its output is subject to interpretation at the interfaces. The most recent debates build upon the latter view, since applying Merge freely simplifies UG in a crucial way. Adjuncts have been under debate in the previous framework of Government & Binding and, strikingly, the issue has not been settled under minimalist approaches either.

Every textbook on syntax addresses adjuncts. Adjuncts actually are such a basic phenomenon of language that they need to be part of any introduction; nevertheless, we do not find a consensus among scholars, even at the textbook level. The way in which beginners of linguistics are confronted with adjuncts is particularly telling because the degree of consensus among linguists can often be judged by considering introductions into a subject. Textbooks discuss more or less the same properties of adjuncts relating to selection, theta roles, order, optionality, islandhood, and more, but the structural proposals look rather different. For instance, Koeneman and Zeijlstra (2017) use a V-recursion so that, in terms of X-bar theory, adjuncts are placed in a X-sister position, making it hard to distinguish them from specifiers and, more concretely, from subjects. Adger (2003) repeats the maximal level and thus resorts to segments of XP (again using X-bar terminology). He leaves room for a subject agent to be projected in the specifier of V, and the most crucial aspect of his analysis is that he assumes an extra syntactic operation Adjoin that introduces adjuncts into the derivation (as opposed to other constituents which enter the derivation via Merge ). Both textbooks use a recursion at a specific X-bar theoretic level, which is actually impossible to formulate in a purely minimalist framework. We will come back to this point later. Similarly, Radford (2006) uses the X-level, with the additional complication that, in his proposal, adjuncts and arguments basically occur in the same positions. The distinction between arguments and adjuncts gets blurred and, if it is reflected in the tree diagrams at all, only works in terms of X-bar-theoretic principles formulated in the previous Government & Binding framework. Thus, it is crucial that we observe that a frequent linguistic phenomenon as adjuncts does not receive a uniform treatment even at textbook level. Hence, it is not surprising that scientific research has not come to a general solution or consensus concerning adjuncts either. The need for a theoretical implementation of adjuncts is obvious. In the beginning of his discussion of adjuncts, Adger stresses that the mechanisms by which adjuncts are implemented into phrase structure still pose major research questions (Adger 2003: 111). After decades of research into the matter, this is a surprising fact. It should invite scholars to put adjuncts on their agenda again, because the theoretical and the empirical nature of the subject needs to be addressed in concert.