HPSG's position on adjunction and movement

[levine at ling.ohio-state.edu]

I think it's important to ensure that the examples given to
show that adjunction to a head-filler phrase aren't
actually illustrations of multiple extraction, with the
adjunct material extracted past the wh-extracted element.
What one needs are examples where the adjunct is the kind
of thing that cannot be extracted, and there are such
examples:

(1) A: Who are Robin's regular drinking buddies?
    B: Well, let's see... this past Thursday she was with
	Terry, Pat, Chris and Rocco, but actually she rarely
        has anything to do with *any* of them...
    A (exasperated) OK, but *usually* who does she go
        drinking with?

`Usually' is one of those exclusively left-adjoined adverbs:

(2)a. Robin usually eats lunch early.
   b. *Robin eats lunch early usually (without comma-break intonation
       after `early').
   c. *How usually does Robin eat lunch early? (no comma-break
       intonation around `usually')

I think similar examples are good if you replace `usually' with
`probably', `typically' and so on. The point is, the crucial example
in (1) can't involve extraction, so has to be plain old adjunction. So
apparentlyit's *not* the case that you can't adjoin to head-filler
phrases [?]


cheers,

Bob