Adverbs and Adverbial Adjuncts at the Interfaces

This book clarifies - on the basis of mainly Hungarian data - basic issues concerning the category ‘adverb,’ the function ‘adverbial,’ and the grammar of adverbial modification. It argues for the PP analysis of adverbials, and claims that they enter the derivation via left- and right-adjunction. Their merge-in position is determined by the interplay of syntactic, semantic, and prosodic factors. The semantically motivated constraints discussed also include a type restriction affecting adverbials semantically incorporated into the verbal predicate, an obligatory focus position for scalar adverbs representing negative values of bidirectional scales, cooccurrence restrictions between verbs and adverbials involving incompatible subevents, etc. The order and interpretation of adverbials in the postverbal domain is shown to be affected by such phonologically motivated constraints as the Law of Growing Constituents, and by intonation phrase restructuring. The shape of the light-headed chain arising in the course of locative PP incorporation is determined by morpho-phonological requirements. The types of adverbs and adverbials analyzed include locatives, temporals, comitatives, epistemic adverbs, adverbs of degree, manner, counting, and frequency, quantificational adverbs, and adverbial participles.

"[...] the book succeeds excellently in covering the entire descriptive array of facts about adverbs and a sizeable portion of other adverbial expressions, together with numerous aspects of their theoretical analysis. [...] this book is a useful collection of recent work, which impresses with thorough empirical coverage and many innovative ideas. The findings and theoretical implications of these studies are relevant to anyone interested in Hungarian and/or Universal Grammar."
Anikó Lipták in: Journal of Liguistics 47 (2011)