Positions and Interpretations

Book excerpt: The structural and semantic properties of adverbials represent a still poorly understood area of sentential syntax and semantics in Germanic languages. In particular, it is an open question which different adverbial usages need to be distinguished, which usages are tied to which syntactic positions, and how these different usage can be formally analyzed. Focussing on adverbial adjectives in German, this study provides detailed answers to these questions. By distinguishing between verb-related adverbials and event-related adverbials, the author provides a new analysis of the large class of adverbials traditionally labelled as manner adverbials. It is shown that the two different classes are linked to different syntactic positions, and formal analyses and derivations for the two different usages are developed. The book is therefore of interest not only to anyone working on the linguistics of German but also to all linguists working on the syntax-semantics interface and the formal analysis of adverbials.