28.4697, Sum: Adjunction Site for Time Adverbials in English

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-4697. Thu Nov 09 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.4697, Sum: Adjunction Site for Time Adverbials in English

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Date: Thu, 09 Nov 2017 08:02:40
From: Carsten Breul [breul at uni-wuppertal.de]
Subject: Adjunction Site for Time Adverbials in English

 
Dear colleagues,

this relates to my LinguistList query ''Adjunction Site for Time Adverbials in
English'' (28.4531).

I am grateful to the following people for their judgements and comments:
Benjamin Bruening, Bruce Despain, Matthew Reeve, And Rosta, Rudy Troike. Most
of them find all my examples (1)-(8) acceptable and observe that those
sentences where the time adverbial is left stranded by VP preposing, i.e. (2,
4, 6, 8), require comma intonation or heavy stress on the adverbial. And Rosta
notes that, for him, a VP preposing construction in the present perfect is
generally of diminished acceptability if the sentence that provides the
appropriate context for the use of that construction (my preceding, bracketed
sentence) is not also in the present perfect. He also finds that (1, 3, 5, 7)
are pragmatically (information structurally) anomalous in that the time
adverbial would need to be information structurally given if pied-piped by VP
preposing, which it is not in (1, 3, 5, 7). Rudy Troike's observation that the
position of the time adverbial in (1, 3) seems to indicate that it is focused
and that for him (2, 4) sound more normal and less emphatic appears to go in a
similar direction. (I think ''comma intonation'' or ''heavy stress'' on the
one hand and ''less emphatic'' on the other hand suggest different possible
intonation contours with different information structural implications.) I
conclude that, in principle, positional time adverbials can be merged both
below and above the auxiliaries DO and HAVE. I may finally note that, as
anticipated in my query, informants have different intuitions about the past
participle vs. base form alternative for the verb in VP preposings in
perfects.

Thanks again and best regards, Carsten
 

Linguistic Field(s): Syntax

Subject Language(s): English (eng)



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