On the Relative Order of IP-adverbials

Sentential adverbs are often assumed to be situated in front of the verb phrase in arbitrary order. In a recent monograph, however, Cinque (1999) claims that the relative order of sentential adverbs may, in principle, be universally fixed. In this paper I first give a brief presentation of Cinque’s proposal. Then I present a pilot study of sentential adverbs in English and Swedish. This study is based on corpora, and it supports Cinque’s proposal. Ever since the idea of a universal grammar was first introduced, linguists around the world have been involved in the business of finding out what it is about grammar that is, or can be, universal. It is obvious that the languages of the world differ from each other to various extents. Linguists working within a generative, chomskyan framework claim, however, that if we succeed in abstracting away from the differences, we will be able to arrive at the general principles that are valid for all languages. In other words, each human child has an innate ability to learn a language. This ability, but not the input to which individual children in various language communities are exposed, is universal. Children raised in English and Swedish environments consequently develop different languages, although they are all equipped with the same universal grammar. Universal grammar is perhaps best described as a collection of principles that govern to what extent individual languages are allowed to vary, i.e. even though the various grammars and the various syntactic structures of the languages of the world may seem to differ to an infinite extent, this is not the case, since universal grammar disqualifies certain grammars but accepts others. As is well known, English and Swedish differ from each other, both formally (e.g. the woman vs. kvinna-n, i.e. a separate word preceding the noun, vs. a definite suffix.) and functionally (e.g. to play the drums vs. *att spela trummorna, i.e. the definite article has to be used in English, while it cannot be used in Swedish.), concerning the use of the definite article, but this variation is accepted, since it does not violate any principles or constraints of universal grammar. In other cases the two languages necessarily behave in exactly the same way, since other behaviours would imply violations of principles of universal grammar. One such principle rules out one of the interpretations of the following sentences, in both English and Swedish: