Grammatikseminarium 23 oktober: Norbert Corver (Utrecht University) on temporal adverbs

On breaking down temporal adverbs

Norbert Corver (Utrecht university, Institute for Language Sciences)

Dutch temporal expressions typically have an adpositional shape (PP), as in Jan vertrok [_PP na het feest] (Jan left after the party), or a (surface) nominal shape (NP/DP), as in Jan vertrok [_DP die dag] (Jan left that day). As regards the latter pattern, it has been proposed that these are hidden adpositional patterns featuring a silent P: [_PP P_silent die dag] (Bresnan & Grimshaw 1978, Emonds 1987, McCawley 1988). Besides these adpositional temporal expressions, Dutch has quite a large number of temporal expressions whose grammatical nature is much less transparent. In traditional reference grammars of Dutch, these expressions are often analyzed as members of the class of adverbs, and treated as simplex (i.e. unanalyzable) words or words with a composite word structure (i.e. compounds). Some illustrations of these temporal adverbs are given in (1)-(4):

(1) eens ‘once’, soms ‘sometimes’, ’s avonds ‘at night’, toens (dialectal: ‘then’), destijds, ‘then/at the time’)

(2) toennet (then-just), daarstraks (then-just, ‘), zojuist (so-just), daarnet (there-just); all meaning ‘just now/a little while ago’)

(3) daarzonet (there-so-just), daarzojuist (there-so-just); all meaning ‘just now/a little while go’)

(4) aldoor (all-through, ‘continuously’), algauw (all-quick, ‘soon/quickly’), allang (all-long, ‘for a long time’), al(s)maar (all-(s)-but, ‘continously’), alreeds (al-ready-s, ‘already/by now’), alsnog (all-s-yet, ‘still/yet’), alweer (all-again, ‘again’)

The temporal adverbs in (1) feature a so-called adverbial -s, those in (2) consist of a pro-form in combination with a modifier, those in (3) might be characterized as ‘cumulative adverbs’ given the sequence of pro-forms (daar + zo), and the adverbs in (4) feature the element al(s) (litt.: all(-s)), which possibly relates to the quantifier al ‘all’ in noun phrases such as al die auto’s ‘all those cars’).

The aim of this talk is to show that these patterns, which are traditionally treated as temporal adverbs (i.e. word-like constructs), are actually phrasal syntactic objects (specifically, adpositional phrases; see Van Riemsdijk 1978, Koopman 2000, Den Dikken 2010), whose inner structure and word order arrangement result from (an interplay of) general syntactic operations and principles, such as E-Merge (composition), I-Merge (displacement), and licensing conditions on silent (nominal) material (Kayne 2003, Collins 2007). Besides giving an analysis of the inner structure of Dutch temporal “adverbs”, I will (briefly) address the question as to whether this syntactic, decompositional approach to Dutch temporal adverbs can be extended to temporal adverbs in other languages.

References:

Bresnan, Joan and Jane Grimshaw. 1978. The Syntax of Free Relatives in English. Linguistic Inquiry 9.3, 331–391 | Collins, Chris. 2007. Home sweet home. NYU Working Papers in Linguistics 1:1-34 | Den Dikken, Marcel. 2010. On the functional structure of locative and directional PPs. In Mapping spatial PPs: The cartography of syntactic structures, vol. 6, eds. G. Cinque and L. Rizzi, 74-126. Oxford: Oxford University Press | Emonds, Joseph. 1987. The Invisible Category Principle. Linguistic Inquiry 18:613-632 | Kayne, Richard S. 2003. Antisymmetry and Japanese. English Linguistics 20:1-40. [Reprinted in R. Kayne (2005), Movement and Silence, Oxford: OUP) | Koopman, Hilda. 2000. Prepositions, postpositions, circumpositions and particles: The structure of Dutch PPs. In The Syntax of Specifiers and Heads, ed., Hilda Koopman. 204-260. London: Routledge | Riemsdijk, Henk van. 1978. A case study in syntactic markedness. Dordrecht: Foris