Syntactic requirements on adjuncts

The Syntactic Algebra of Adjuncts

This paper gives a theory-neutral account of the Adjunct Island Constraint. I show that the island status of adjuncts is a consequence of two properties that set them apart from arguments: optionality and independence. Adjuncts can be omitted without affecting grammaticality as in (1), and if an utterance may contain adjunct a or adjunct b, then it may also contain both a and b, which is exempl...

Cognitive Mechanisms & Syntactic Theory: Arguments against Adjuncts in the Lexicon

As a psychologist who studies sentence comprehension and holds a joint appointment in the departments of psychology and linguistics, I have frequent opportunities to observe the interaction, or lack thereof, between the two disciplines. Although cognitive psychology and formal linguistic theory share some common history in Chomsky's (1959) pivotal review of Skinner's (1957) book on language beh...

Clustering Syntactic Positions with Similar Semantic Requirements

This article describes an unsupervised strategy to acquire syntactico-semantic requirements of nouns, verbs, and adjectives from partially parsed text corpora. The linguistic notion of requirement underlying this strategy is based on two specific assumptions. First, it is assumed that two words in a dependency are mutually required. This phenomenon is called here corequirement. Second, it is al...

Syntactic Analysis Requirements of Machine Translation

Deriving Syntactic Properties of Arguments and Adjuncts from Neo-Davidsonian Semantics

This paper aims to show that certain syntactic differences between arguments and adjuncts can be thought of as a transparent reflection of differences between their contributions to neo-Davidsonian logical forms. Specifically, the crucial underlying distinction will be that between modifying an event variable directly, and modifying an event variable indirectly via a thematic relation. I note a...