Basic English Syntax with Exercises

Radford, Andrew

1.3.4.3 Adjectives

Though we will maintain the traditional terms for adjectives and adverbs, as there has not been a common term developed for them (Radford 1988 has suggested Adjerb or Advective, but surprisingly they did not catch on!). However, we will use the general category label A to stand for this whole category.

3.3 Conclusion

In this chapter we have briefly set down many of the theoretical mechanisms which we will be using in the rest of the book to describe syntactic phenomena in English. There is a lot more to say on theoretical issues and many differences of opinion as to how they should be formulated. However, as it is not our intention to teach all the details of the theory, but merely to use it, we will not go into these issues and the interested reader is directed to other text books, such as Haegeman (1994), Webelhuth (1995) or Radford (2004) for more detailed discussion on theoretical issues.

5.4.1 Adverbs

There looks to be a good deal of freedom in determining the position of the adverb and thus it appears to be able to adjoin to virtually any part of the VP. The one exception is that the adverb may not intervene between the verb and its object. However, the adjacency requirement between the verb and its object is not so straightforward to account for under the assumptions we have been making. Other accounts of this restriction have made different assumptions. For example, Radford (1988) assumes that the object is in the complement position of the verb and that the adjacency requirement between the two is a reflex of X-bar theory itself: the head must be adjacent to its complement otherwise an ill formed structure results: