Positions and Interpretations: German Adverbial Adjectives at the Syntax-Semantics Interface

✍ Scribed by Martin Schäfer

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2013
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 252
• Series: Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM]; 245
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The structural and semantic properties of adverbials represent a still poorly understood area of sentential syntax and semantics in Germanic languages. In particular, it is an open question which different adverbial usages need to be distinguished, which usages are tied to which syntactic positions, and how these different usage can be formally analyzed. Focussing on adverbial adjectives in German, this study provides detailed answers to these questions. By distinguishing between verb-related adverbials and event-related adverbials, the author provides a new analysis of the large class of adverbials traditionally labelled as manner adverbials. It is shown that the two different classes are linked to different syntactic positions, and formal analyses and derivations for the two different usages are developed. The book is therefore of interest not only to anyone working on the linguistics of German but also to all linguists working on the syntax-semantics interface and the formal analysis of adverbials.

✦ Table of Contents

1 Introduction
1 Scope and aim
2 On adverbials and adjectives
2.1 Defining adverbials
2.1.1 Adverbial vs. subject
2.1.2 Adverbial vs. object
2.1.3 Adverbial vs. predicative
2.1.4 Adverbial vs. particle
2.1.5 Summary
2.2 Adverbial adjectives
2.2.1 Adjectives
2.2.2 Adverbs
2.2.3 Adjective or adverb?
2.3 Summary
3 Basic distinctions
3.1 Class properties of adverbial adjectives
3.2 Set-theoretic classifications of adjectives
3.3 Sentence and non-sentence adverbials
3.4 Other important semantic properties
3.4.1 Opacity
3.4.2 Veridicality
4 Structure of the book
2 The readings of sentence adverbials
1 Introduction
2 Subject-oriented adverbials
2.1 Adverbial adjectives as subject-oriented adverbials
3 Speaker-oriented adverbials
3.1 Speech-act adverbials
3.2 Epistemic adverbials
3.3 Evaluative adverbials
4 Domain adverbials
5 Semantic constraints on possible sentence adverbials
6 Conclusion
3 The readings of verb-related adverbials
1 Introduction
2 Manner adverbials
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Pure manner adverbials
2.3 Agent-oriented manner adverbials
2.4 Further orientations
3 Degree adverbials
3.1 Contexts and constraints for degree modification
3.2 Degree-manner ambiguities
4 Method-oriented adverbials
5 Verb-related adverbials and secondary predication
5.1 Resultatives
5.2 Ambiguities and blends
5.3 Depictives
6 Adverbial adjectives and the verb-adverbial combinatorics
6.1 Statives that allow manner modification
6.2 Mannerless statives
7 Verb-related adverbials and negation
7.1 Negation, adverbials, and the sentential base
7.2 Verb-related adverbials with scope over negation
8 Conclusion
4 Event-related adverbials
1 Mental-attitude adverbials
1.1 Mental-attitude adverbials and opacity
1.2 Mental-attitude adverbials vs. secondary predication
1.3 Transparent adverbials
1.4 Transparent adverbials, depictives and negation
2 Event-external adverbials
2.1 Inchoative readings of schnell and langsam
2.2 Holistic usages
2.2.1 Holistic usages and the internal structure of the event
2.2.2 Quantified direct objects
2.2.3 Modifiers of complex events
3 The wobei-paraphrase
3.1 Wobei vs. während
3.2 Event-related adverbials and the wobei-paraphrase
3.2.1 Mental-attitude adverbials and the wobei-paraphrase
3.2.2 The wobei-paraphrase and event-external modification
3.2.3 The wobei-paraphrase and associated readings
4 Summary
5 The syntactic position of manner adverbials
1 Introduction
2 Establishing syntactic positions
3 Adverbial modification and information structure
3.1 Focus projection
3.2 Adverbials and normal word order
4 Eckardt’s account: Scrambled indefinite direct objects
4.1 Restricted combinations: Implicit resultatives and verbs of creation
4.2 The readings of indefinites and topicality
4.3 In-group readings
4.4 Problems for Eckardt’s account
4.4.1 Frey vs Eckardt: The strong reading of indefinites
4.4.2 Manner adverbials and verbs of creation
5 Frey and Pittner: Object integration
5.1 Resultatives and integration
6 An alternative account: It’s the adverbial’s reading that is decisive
6.1 Adverbials out of the blue
6.1.1 Thetic sentences
6.2 Re-interpreting the controversial examples
6.2.1 Existentially interpreted w-phrases
6.2.2 W-phrases: Re-interpreting the data
6.3 Theme-rheme condition
7 More evidence and some subtleties
7.1 Clear minimal pairs
7.2 Lexical semantics and verb-adverbial combinatorics
7.3 Scrambling
8 Summary
6 Adverbials in formal semantics: The classical analyses
1 The operator approach
1.1 Thomason and Stalnaker
1.2 The operator approach and scope
1.3 The operator approach as a general analysis of modification structures
1.4 Criticism of the operator approach
1.4.1 The cognitive inappropriateness of the intensional solution
1.4.2 Entailments in the operator approach
2 The argument approach: McConnell-Ginet
2.1 Entailments in McConnell-Ginet’s approach
3 The predicate approach: Event-based semantics
3.1 Event-based semantics and intuitive plausibility
3.2 The scope of the event-based approach
3.3 Neo-Davidsonian approaches
4 Possible combinations: Events and the predicate-modifier approach
4.1 Adding events
4.2 Event-based semantics as a refinement
5 Conclusion
7 The semantic analysis of verb-related adverbials
1 Manners in the ontology
1.1 The history of the idea
1.2 The cognitive status of manners
2 Manners in the representation
2.1 The technical aspects: Getting manners into the representation and specifying them
3 Benefits of the analysis
3.1 Differentiating the readings and the link to syntax
3.2 The syntax-semantics interface
3.3 Event-related modification: The difficult cases
4 Summary
8 Summary and outlook
1 Results
2 Outlook
Notes
References
Index