Casting a Minimalist Eye on Adjuncts

Offering a comprehensive overview of research on adjuncts and foundational minimalist principles, this book will be of particular interest to graduate students and practicing researchers interested in syntax.

This book offers a comprehensive account of adjuncts in generative grammar, seeking to reconcile the differing ways in which they have been treated in the past by proposing a method of analysis grounded in simplification based on Simplest Merge.

The volume provides an up-to-date review of the existing literature on adjuncts and outlines their characteristic properties and the subsequent difficulties in adequately defining and treating them. The book compares previous attempts to account for adjuncts which have tended to use additional mechanisms or syntactic operations as a jumping-off point from which to propose a new way forward for analyzing them grounded in minimalist theory. Adopting an approach in the spirit of the strong minimalist thesis (SMT), Bode suggests an analysis of adjuncts which applies a minimalist approach based on theoretical simplicity, one which does not resort to extra mechanisms in capturing the empirical properties of adjuncts.

Offering a comprehensive overview of research on adjuncts and foundational minimalist principles, this book will be of particular interest to graduate students and practicing researchers interested in syntax.

Autorentext

Stefanie Bode is Adjunct Lecturer at the Georg-August University of Göttingen, Department of English Philology - Linguistics, Germany. Her doctoral thesis on the verb 'be' in the English sentence structure was published in 2003. A short paper on this subject (One Be: One Syntactic Function) can be found online https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110929928.65.

Inhalt

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction

2. What are Adjuncts?

3. The Minimalist Framework

4. Approaches to Adjuncts

5. A New Proposal: Labeling is Transfer

6. Conclusions and Outlook

Index