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Part of
Adjective Adverb Interfaces in Romance
Edited by Martin Hummel and Salvador Valera
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 242] 2017
► pp. 329–363

Chapter 12
Adverbial adjectives and the decomposition of event predicates

| University of Girona

This article provides an analysis of the so-called “adverbial adjectives” in Romance on the basis of a theory of syntactic decomposition of the event predicate by using Hale & Keyser’s Configurational Theory of Argument Structure. The first part establishes a hierarchy of adverbial adjectives according to the different levels of the argument structure of the predicate they are related to. The last section analyses the structural conditions determining the alternation between adverbial adjectives and secondary predicates. The article claims that the non-agreeing properties and the particular semantic interpretation of adverbial adjectives are the result of the interaction between their own lexical and semantic features and the portion of the internal structure of the event predicate they are associated with.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Adverbial adjectives and the syntactic decomposition of event predicates
    • 2.1Adverbial adjectives and inherent modification
    • 2.2Adverbial adjectives and eventive modification
    • 2.3Adverbial adjectives and durative interpretation
    • 2.4Adverbial adjectives and argumental interpretation
  • 3.Some ambiguities
  • 4.Adverbial adjectives and secondary predicates
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 21 December 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.242.13sun
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