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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 21, No. 0, pp.1196-1213
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2021
Received 15 Oct 2021 Revised 15 Dec 2021 Accepted 27 Dec 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.21..202112.1196

The Distribution of Noun-Modifying Adverbs in English

Juwon Lee
Assistant Professor, Dept. of English Education, Jeonju University 303, Cheonjam-ro, Wansan-gu, Jeonju-si, Jeollabuk-do, 55069, Tel: 063-220-2326 juwonlee@jj.ac.kr


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This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper investigates the distributions of adverbs in English. They are known to modify adjectives, adverbs, and verbs. However, we can find the cases in which an adverb modifies the head noun in an NP (e.g., the use temporarily of Australian troops to defend Ceylon). This kind of adverb modifications can be a problem for a syntactic analysis of the NPs based on X’-theory since the adjunct (temporarily) is placed in between the head noun (use) and its PP complement (of Australian troops). This configuration prevents the head noun from combining first with its PP complement. I argue in this paper that the NPs of the kind are not a problem for a constraint-based grammar and show that the distributions of the noun-modifying adverbs and other normal adverbs in English can be straightforwardly analyzed in the framework of HPSG (Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar) (Pollard & Sag 1994; Sag et al. 2003).

Keywords:

noun-modifying adverb, complement, adjunct, noun phrase, X’-theory, HPSG

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