Neeleman, A; Payne, A; (2019) PP Extraposition and the Order of Adverbials in English. Linguistic Inquiry 10.1162/ling_a_00352. (In press).

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Abstract

In English, adverbials may intervene between the verb and a selected PP. We initially consider three analyses of this fact. The traditional account is that the PP shifts rightward across a right-adjoined adverbial (Stowell 1981). An alternative account is that the verb moves leftward across a left-adjoined adverbial (Pesetsky 1989, Johnson 1991). A third possibility is a hybrid account that assumes both extraposition and verb raising. We argue that the order of postverbal adverbials favors the extraposition analysis, provided this analysis is combined with the auxiliary hypothesis that certain adverbials can directly modify other adverbials (Rohrbacher 1994, Williams 2014). We then compare two instantiations of the extraposition analysis: the traditional account and an antisymmetric account that emulates PP-extraposition through a combination of PP-intraposition and roll-up movement. While close to being notational variants, these accounts can be teased apart using the very strict locality requirement that holds of association with temporal only. The data then show that the symmetric account has the edge. We close with a brief discussion of the implications of our findings for the analysis of the English VP, with a focus on the circumstances under which the verb moves.

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