Meaning and grammar seminar

Speaker: Elise Newman (University of Edinburgh)

Title: On obligatory adjuncts in middles

Abstract: In this talk, I explore the puzzling ameliorating effect that adjuncts have on a set of sentences often referred to as the middle construction. Notice, for example, in (1) that the presence of the adverb is crucial to the sentence’s wellformedness. This is surprising, given that adjuncts are supposed to be optional phrases (by definition).

• (1) Bureaucrats bribe *(easily).

While most analyses of (1) propose that the adverb is there for semantic reasons, I argue that the distribution of adjuncts in middle constructions motivates a syntactic analysis: the position and quantity of adjuncts matters for certain verbs and in certain languages, in ways that cannot be explained by their meanings. Notice the contrast between (2) and (3), for example, where negation counts as an ameliorating adjunct for the verb cut, but not for the verb bribe. In addition, some verbs that are traditionally thought to be incompatible with middle constructions become acceptable when multiple adjunct phrases are added (4).

• (2) This bread doesn’t cut.
• (3) *This bureaucrat doesn’t bribe.
• (4a) *Fake diamonds steal easily.
• (4b) *This diamond won't steal.
• (4c) ?This diamond won’t steal easily.

I propose that the syntactic motivation for adjuncts in middles is that they license movement steps of the thematic object to subject position, which would otherwise be too short to count as meaningful movement steps (following the literature on Anti-locality effects, see e.g. Abels, 2003; Grohmann, 2003; Bošković, 2007; Schneider-Zioga, 2007; Erlewine, 2016; Brillman & Hirsch, to appear. Adjuncts inserted in crucial positions make each intermediate landing site for movement different enough from its corresponding launching cite to make the movement step count as a non-redundant extension of the clause. The reason that adjunct requirements are different for different verbs is therefore because different verbs come with different amounts and types of lexical structure, which itself may take on the role of an adjunct in extending the domain over which movement applies.