Genoveva Puskás

Medial NP-adjuncts in English: A diachronic perspective

This paper offers an overview of the history of medial NP-adjuncts from Old English to Present-Day English. In Present-Day English, adverbs are perfectly grammatical in a position between the subject and the main verb (He recently left for London) whereas NP-adjuncts are at best stylistically marked in this position ((*)He tomorrow leaves for London). The paper shows that while medial placement of NP-adjuncts has been considerably less frequent as compared to adverbs ever since around 1500, the contrast was initially much stronger in clauses with finite main verbs than in clauses with finite auxiliaries. It is only in the 19th century that medial placement becomes equally marked in both contexts. These developments are accounted for in terms of processing constraints disfavouring the use of medial NP-adjuncts and a structural reanalysis of NP-medial adjuncts in Late Modern English.

Locality and the functional sequence in the left periphery

Cartographic studies have focused on the sequences of functional elements which characterize the fine structure of the different zones of clauses and phrases. Such functional sequences have well-defined properties, which have been the target of extensive study in recent year: properties of ordering, of dependencies and mutual incompatibilities between positions, of freezing induced by certain functional elements and the like. These discoveries have substantially enriched the empirical coverage of theoretical and comparative syntax. Why is it that we typically find certain properties of ordering and cooccurrence restrictions, rather than others? As pointed out in Cinque and Rizzi (2010) it is unlikely that the functional hierarchy may be an absolute syntactic primitive, unrelated to other requirements or constraints: why should natural language syntax have evolved to express such a complex and apparently unmotivated primitive? It is more plausible that the functional hierarchy and its properties (to the extent to which they are universal) may be rooted elsewhere. So, properties of the functional sequence should be amenable to “further explanations” in terms of deductive interactions involving basic ingredients and fundamental principles of linguistic computations. The search for such further explanations should be considered an integral part of the cartographic endeavor (Rizzi 2013). What could be possible sources of “further explanation” for the properties of functional sequences? Two broadly defined candidates come to mind: 1. Certain properties could derive from requirements of the interface systems. For instance, it could be that functional head B may necessarily occur under functional head A (thus giving the linear order AB in head initial languages and BA in head-final languages) because the opposite hierarchical order would yield a structure not properly interpretable. Ordering of aspect below tense may be a case in point, as well as other cases of the strict orders between functional elements in the IP spine systematically mapped in Cinque (1999)