Adjuncts and Minimalist Grammars

Abstract

The behaviour of adverbs and adjectives has qualities of both ordinary selection and something else, something unique to modifiers. This makes them difficult to model. Modifiers are generally optional and transparent to selection while arguments are required and driven by selection. Cinque [4] proposes that adverbs, functional heads, and descriptive adjectives are underlyingly uniformly ordered across languages and models them by ordinary Merge or selection. Such a model captures only the ordering restrictions on these morphemes; it fails to capture their optionality and transparency to selection. I propose a model of adjunction with a separate Adjoin function that allows the derivation to keep track of both the true head of the phrase and the place in the Cinque hierarchy of the modifier, preventing inverted modifier orders in the absence of Move.

Many thanks to Ed Stabler, my dissertation committee chair, as well as to the rest of my committee (Ed Keenan, Martin Monti, and Carson Schutze). Thank you also to Thomas Graf for our MG discussions, UCLA syntax/semantics seminar, audiences at MoL13 and NWLC 2013, and of course to three very helpful anonymous reviewers.