Adverb position and verb raising

[Joan Bresnan]

Aaron, You raise an interesting point.  Recent LFG work (Toivonen's
Stanford dissertation, Sells's CSLI monograph, Berman's Stuttgart
dissertation, are examples that come immediately to mind) has argued
for V positioning outside of VP, and used adverb positioning as
evidence (among other arguments).  You raise the question of whether
the structure-function mapping theory I propose (2001) entails this
analysis, for configurational languages, at least.

I think your argument that a flat structure [V Adv NP] is ruled out by
one of my formulations of the principles is correct: adjuncts only get
their annotations by being adjoined to some phrasal node.
But I don't think my princples rule out structures like the following:

i)           VP
             |
             V'
            / \
          V'   NP
         / \
        V'  AdvP
        |
        V

ii)          VP
             |
             V'
            / \
          V    NP
         / \
        V   AdvP


Either of these structures would would allow a VP-internal verb,
adverb, and object in that order.  But if you can rule them out for
Hebrew, then your argument would go through, I think.

Note that Ida Toivonen has argued that the theory I give in my book is
too weak, though.  IIRC, her theory would disallow (i).  Also, Louisa Sadler
in her work on Welsh and Peter Sells in his monograph on object shift
in Swedish in OT-LFG have argued for constraints on structures like
(ii).

HTH,

J.


> Dear Colleagues,
>
> I'd like your opinions on the extent to which adverb placement is a valid
> diagnostic for verb raising.  I believe the earliest form of this argument
> may be due to Edmonds (1978) for French.  The basic idea is that adverbs
> need to be adjoined to a XP.  Therefore, the contrast between English and
> Hebrew  implies a difference of verb position
>
> 1.)  	Dani opened the door gently.
> 	*Dani opened gently the door.
>
>
> 2.)  	Hebrew  (Shlonsky 1997)
>
> 	Dani patax be-'adinut  	        'et ha-delet.
> 	Dani opened with-gentleness   acc the-door
>
> 	'Dani opened the door gently.'
>
> Since 'gently' needs to be adjoined to XP, there is some phrasal boundary
> between the V and its object.  In a movement-based framework, we would say
> that the verb has moved out from V to some higher functional head (Agr,
> Infl, etc.)  In recent LFG, we could say that the verb is realized in Infl.
>
> My question is the extent to which data like (2) force us to such an
> analysis.  In Bresnan (2001:102)'s principles of structure-function
> mapping, the principle that deals with adverbs and other adjuncts says
>
> "(d) Constituents adjoined to phrasal constituents are nonargument
> functions AF' or not annotated.'
>
> Compare
>
> "(e) Complements of lexical categories are the nondiscourse functions CF."
>
> [CF is the non-discourse argument-functions OBJ, OBJ-th, OBL-th, COMP]
>
> My reading of these principles is that (so long as the language has an
> endocentric phrasal organization) a Hebrew example like (2) cannot have a
> flat VP like the following.
>
> [V Adv NP]
>
> That would follow because the Adv would be a complement of the lexical
> category V.  Because it doesn't receive a complement function, this
> structure violates the principles.  And because it should receive a
> non-argument function ADJUNCT, it needs to be adjoined to a phrasal
> constituent.
>
> 	Do readers of this list agree with this implication?  If it is correct, it
> means that adverb position has a strong predictive power in telling us when
> a verb is positioned outside VP.  In particular, according to this test,
> the verb is outside VP in most Romance languages, since French, Spanish,
> and Italian show the Hebrew pattern.  It also means that in general, we can
> use adverbs to find phrase boundaries in less familiar languages.
>
> 	But I have seen little explicit LFG work on adverb positions, so I am not
> sure of the extent to which people agree or disagree with this implication
> of the structure-function principles.  I'd be interested to hear reactions.
>
> Thanks,
> Aaron Broadwell
> ==================================
> George Aaron Broadwell
> Dept. of Anthropology
> University at Albany, SUNY
> Albany, NY 12222
> g.broadwell at albany.edu
> http://www.albany.edu/anthro/fac/broadwell.htm