Functional Projections and Adverbial Expressions in Chinese

With addition to the number and type of functional categories, several new claims have been made with respect to the licensing and generation of adverbs/adverbials. In particular, these expressions have been argued to be treated as specifiers of functional categories and/or complements of verbs, the former of which need to agree with their respective heads in semantic features. Alexiadou’s (1997) and Cinque’s (1999) approaches, for instance, are of this kind. By comparing the syntactic and semantic behavior of adverbs/adverbials between Chinese-type and English-type languages, it is shown in this paper that a nonspecifier analysis of adverbs/adverbials as given in Chomsky (1986, 1995), Travis (1988), and Tang (1990), among others, seem to better account for the distribution of adjuncts. In addition, we demonstrate that conditions on adjunctdistribution have to do with both the hierarchical structure of functional categories and the semantic rules of the scope of modification.