Phasing the Domain of Adverb Licensing

Abstract

It has often been claimed that adverbs are freely distributed within a sentence (Keyser (1968), Emonds (1976), Baltin (1982)). However, as pointed out by linguists such as Jackendoff (1972), Travis (1988), and Cinque (1999), the free distribution of adverbs is only apparent, that is, the distribution of adverbs is in fact fairly restricted, apart from some residual cases of free distribution. The purpose of this paper is to explain the distributional restriction and freedom of adverbs. We propose that the distribution of adverbs can be well-captured by a local condition on the adverb licensing based on the Phase Theory (Chomsky (1998, 1999)). Our analysis can explain the distribution of Class V and VI adverbs as well as other adverbs, which have not been given a deep research since Jackendoff (1972). The AspP phase was hypothesized to capture the distribution of Class VI adverbs. We provided and independent evidence for the AspP phase. The distributional difference between Class V adverbs and other adverbs is captured in the light of the complement-vs-adjunct distintion. We critically reviewed two different types of approaches to the adverb distribution in comparison to our analysis: adverbs as heads (Travis (1984)) and adverbs as specs (Laenzlinger (1993), Rijkhoek (1994), Alexiadou (1997), Cinque (1995, 1999)). We have shown that treating adverbs as heads or specs is not right in consideration of Relativized Minimality and several other points and that neither the head analysis nor the spec analysis can explain the whole range of adverb distribution data.