Fewer adjuncts: more relatives*

Substantially agreeing with Hornstein (2009: 81), “it is fair to say that what adjuncts are and how they function grammatically is not well understood”. I refer the reader to, e.g., Hornstein 2009: chapter 4, Hornstein & Nunes 2008, Hunter 2010 or most recently Hunter 2015 for a catalog of properties and problems adjuncts raise in general, and in particular for all previous proposals including the one in terms of set merge vs pair merge explored in Chomsky 2000 (hardly compatible, as noted in Hornstein 2009: p. 81 with the Bare Phrase Structure assumptions defended in Chomsky 1995). These authors, with whose criticisms of previous proposals I agree, defend their own proposals, which try to deal with the properties adjuncts display while maintaining parsimonious assumptions about syntactic theory. In this short note, I will simply put forth a different proposal, without discussion of these authors’s proposals. In a nutshell, the general, programmatic, idea is this:1