Measure DP Adverbials: Measure Phrase Modification inunhbox voidb@x penalty @M {}VP

This paper seeks to establish that measure phrases in the extended AP and PP—such as six feet tall and twenty minutes before midnight—have a direct counterpart in the verbal domain. These verbal measure phrases, exemplified in English in e.g. He slept several hours, constitute a natural class distinct from other DP adverbials and characterized by obligatorily narrow scope, low structural position, an Aktionsart-related presupposition, and quantificationally weak interpretations. This constellation of characteristics is shown to follow naturally from the view that these expressions mirror core syntactic and semantic properties of AP and PP measure phrases. In particular, it will be argued here that these expressions have a syntax that places them in the specifier of a functional projection, just as has long been assumed for AP/PP measure phrases and as has been proposed in a different and independent line of research for adverbials more generally; and that they have a semantics in which they are interpreted as arguments of the head of this licensing projection, and therefore scopally and distributionally constrained and implicated in the aspectual semantics of the clause. Aktionsart information which cannot plausibly come from the DP itself is thereby attributed instead to a verbal feature responsible for licensing the adverbial. Independent evidence for this approach is adduced from true adverbs and parallels with proposals made in the analysis of accusative adverbials in Slavic and in Finnish.