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What is an adjunct?

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 What is an adjunct?

Craig  Sailor & Carson T. Schütze

[email protected], [email protected]
Draft: September, 2013

Submitted to The book of syntactic questions – 100 ideas for 21st century syntax,
ed. Hubert Haider & Henk van Riemsdijk, Berlin: De Gruyter.

Comments welcome

What is an adjunct? This seemingly simple but fundamental question has resisted an easy
answer and sparked much debate. As Hornstein and Nunes (2008: 57) put it, “It is fair to say that
what adjuncts are and how they function grammatically is not well understood. The current wis-
dom comes in two parts: (i) a description of some of the salient properties of adjuncts (they are
optional, not generally selected, often display island effects, etc.) and (ii) a technology to code
their presence (Chomsky-adjunction, different labels, etc.).” (For classic discussion of the argu-
ment/adjunct distinction, see Jackendoff 1977 and Pollard and Sag 1987.) Optionality is the most
widely agreed upon property of adjuncts, often taken as criterial. At the same time, it has long
been observed that there are cases that appear to involve obligatory adjuncts.
Our goals here are (i) to demonstrate that obligatory adjuncts are more widespread than is
generally assumed, and (ii) to argue that the ensuing paradox calls for a fundamental re-thinking
of how adjuncts should be conceived and analyzed. Our title can thus be elaborated as: Do ad-
juncts constitute a homogeneous class? If so, by what criteria, and can they be given a unified
structural treatment?

Obligatory adjuncts: a (partial) catalog

There are at least seven environments where apparent adjuncts are descriptively obligatory.

1. Selection by verbs
A small set of notorious verbs appear to select for adverbial modification (Levin 1993):

(1) a. John{meant/acquitted himself} *(well).

b. Mary behaved *(badly) to(wards) John.

Some of these may constitute idioms, but perhaps not all.

2. Predicate inversion
While the canonically-ordered examples in (2) are grammatical with bare NP predicates,
their inverted counterparts in (3) are ill-formed if the predicate is not modified (usually by a rela-
tive clause):

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 (2) a. Barack Obama is a man.
b. Paris is a city.

(3) a. A man *(who we’re dying to meet) is Barack Obama.

b. A city *(that everyone should visit) is Paris.

This is not merely a quirk of English; it replicates in other languages, including Italian, where an
adjective constitutes sufficient modification:

(4) Un *(bravo) padre è Obama. Italian

a good father is Obama
‘Obama is a *(good) father.’

We intersperse Italian examples throughout (Ivano Caponigro, p.c.) to underscore the crosslin-
guistic attestation of obligatory adjuncts.

3. Cognate objects
True cognate objects are unacceptable without modification (when the determiner is a/the):

(5) a. John slept a *(fitful) sleep.

b. Mary laughed a *(sad) laugh.
c. Susan smiled a smile *(that encouraged me).

(6) Maria ha riso di un riso *(amaro). Italian

Maria has laughed of a laugh bitter
‘Maria laughed a *(bitter) laugh.’

This does not hold of the superficially-similar hyponymous object construction (e.g., with dance)
(Jones 1988).

4. Various resultative constructions

There are three phenomena involving strictly intransitive verbs taking apparent surface ob-
jects, all with resultative flavor; this is possible only if those objects are modified (Jackendoff
1990):

(7) John laughed himself *(sick). Fake reflexive

(8) Sue sneezed the tissue *(off the table). Caused-motion construction
(9) Tom cheated his way *(to an A+). Way-construction

5. Free choice any

In some environments, including episodic statements, free choice any demands that its
head noun be modified (Dayal 2004):

(10) a. John read any book *(he found/on the table).

b. I grabbed anything *(that could be useful).

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 (11) Ho afferrato qualunque cosa ??((che fosse ) sul tavolo). Italian
have.1SG grabbed whatever thing that was.SBJN on.the table
‘I grabbed anything ??((that was) on the table).’

6. Middles
It has been claimed that the English middle construction is ungrammatical without adver-
bial modification:

(12) a. This luggage stows away *(easily).

b. Cotton shirts iron *(quickly).

(13) Il libro si presenta *(bene). Italian

the book SI presents well
‘The book presents *(well).’

While there apparently are middles that do not share this requirement (Rapoport 1999), the above
examples are clearly ill-formed without modification.

7. Pseudo-middle nominals
The same effect arises in what we dub “pseudo-middle nominals,” which we believe are
related to middle voice. To our knowledge, these have not been previously discussed in the liter-
ature:

(14) a. Moby-Dick is a *(great) read.

b. John is an *(easy) lay.

(15) Maria è una scopata *(facile). Italian

Mary is a fuck easy
‘Mary is an *(easy) fuck.’

See Ahn and Sailor (in press) for other predicate nominals that seem to require modification,
which they argue are also related to middle voice.

Theoretical consequences

Given these exceptions to the supposed optionality of adjuncts, one could simply define the
problem away: since they are obligatory they cannot be adjuncts, therefore they must be some-
thing else. This is unsatisfying because we have a strong intuition that obligatory adjuncts are
semantically and categorially on par with canonical (optional/non-essential) modifiers: adjec-
tives, adverbs, relative clauses, and certain PPs, all acting as predicates. It is conceivable that this
apparent unity is epiphenomenal and should have no theoretical status; we do not explore that
possibility. Instead, we suggest that obligatory adjuncts are real, and thus that optionality cannot
be a criterial property (or diagnostic) for adjuncthood. We are then faced with two problems: (i)
identifying why adjuncts are sometimes obligatory, and (ii) determining how adjuncthood should
be implemented theoretically.

3
 Regarding (i): certain sentences, while perhaps syntactically well-formed, are commonly
thought to be insufficiently informative (perhaps tautological) without modification (e.g., Gold-
berg and Ackerman 2001). For example, *Moby-Dick is a read arguably cannot contribute any-
thing to a discourse, being as uninformative as This book is a book. (A potential challenge: the
former still “sounds worse” than the latter to many speakers.) In addition to middles and pseudo-
middle nominals, such a pragmatic explanation extends to the cases in (1), (5)/(6), and (10)/(11);
(3)/(4) would require something more, perhaps involving the information-theoretic properties of
predicate inversion. This approach strikes us as unpromising for the resultatives in (7)–(9), how-
ever: without the adjunct these structures are unrescuable by any amount of pragmatic tweaking.
Intuitively it is the adjunct that licenses the presence of the “object.”
Turning to (ii), in the earlier P&P approach, an adjunct XP modifying some YP was typi-
cally given the analysis in (16):

(16) [YP [XP X ] [YP Y ] ]

That is, the adjunct XP is simultaneously sister to and daughter of another maximal projection—
a sort of selectional no-man’s-land, neither changing the category of the YP it combines with,
nor appearing in a position that Y selects for (i.e., its specifier or complement). Thus, adjuncts
were thought of as somehow set apart from the selectional process that drives most syntactic
structure-building. While perhaps technically unsatisfying, this approach is at least consistent
with adjuncts being optional modulo extra-syntactic considerations.
In Minimalism, matters have not improved. We concur with Hornstein and Nunes in their
continuation of the above quote: “Within the Minimalist Program, adjuncts have largely been
treated as afterthoughts and this becomes clear when the technology deployed to accommodate
them is carefully (or even cursorily) considered.” For example, Pair-Merge is at least as ad hoc
as (16), and the idea that adjuncts are uniformly Merged post-cyclically (“late merger of ad-
juncts,” e.g., Stepanov (2001), extending Lebeaux (1988)) is widely accepted. However, obliga-
toriness must originate in the lexicon: it reflects the demands of some feature hard-coded into the
lexical entry of a syntactic head. Such features drive selection, and their satisfaction is required
for convergence (cf. Full Interpretation (Chomsky 1995)). Thus, if an adjunct is obligatory, then
some head has selected for it; moreover, for the derivation to converge, that adjunct must be
Merged in the narrow syntax. Therefore, if certain adjuncts can select for some part of the clausal
spine (e.g., perhaps the resultatives (5)–(7)), then they must be Merged as part of the normal der-
ivational cycle, contra late merger of adjuncts.
This might be taken to support the alternative analysis of adverbials and other adjuncts in
Cinque (1999) and subsequent work. That is, if adjuncts are Merged in the specifiers of function-
al heads that are universally present on the clausal spine, the appearance of an adjunct selecting
or being selected for may actually reflect the behavior of the (silent) functional head whose spec-
ifier that adjunct occupies. While this approach to “adjunction” (now fully rooted in selection)
has been fruitful, it raises its own questions: e.g., if (non-)obligatoriness is lexical, how can ad-
junction be reduced to selection (as Cinque, i.a., does) without exploding the size of the lexion?
These issues remain to be fully understood.

4
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