Deconstructing merge and move to make room for adjunction

Friday, 24 September 2010, Syntax Colloquium
Tim Hunter, Yale

Abstract

Many descriptive generalizations have been established concerning the characteristic properties of adjuncts: adjuncts are optional and iterable, they are generally islands, they can avoid reconstruction, etc. This talk addresses the question of why these properties should cluster together, and proposes an analysis of adjunction which unifies the various characteristic properties that have been observed. The proposal emerges from the interaction of two crucial ingredients that I take from previous work: first, the observation that in neo-Davidsonian semantics adjunction generally corresponds to a particularly “simple” kind of semantic composition (namely plain conjunction), and second, the intuition that syntactic movement might be usefully thought of as “merely re-merging”. Guided by these two intuitions I develop a system which naturally makes strong predictions about how adjunction and movement should interact, and in particular, predictions that unify some of the distinctive properties of adjunction.