Open Accessanalysis of the semantic variability of weak adjuncts and its problems
Author(s) -
Sarah Zobel
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
zas papers in linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1435-9588
DOI - 10.21248/zaspil.61.2018.509
Subject(s) - adverbial , predicate (mathematical logic) , computer science , modal , natural language processing , linguistics , focus (optics) , semantic property , modal verb , artificial intelligence , verb , philosophy , chemistry , physics , polymer chemistry , optics , programming language
This paper addresses the question of how to account for the semantic variability ofweak free adjuncts. Weak free adjuncts are non-clausal adjuncts that associate with an argumentof the main predicate, contribute propositional content, and can interact with temporalor modal operators, which leads to different, adverbial-clause-like interpretations. I focus on aspecific type of weak adjuncts, non-clausal as-phrases, and propose a unified semantic analysisfor the full range of interpretational possibilities that takes into account the interpretational contingencyon different syntactic positions. I show that this analysis improves on Stump’s (1985)original analysis of weak adjuncts. I then go on to discuss the limitations of both Stump’s accountand the unified account. Both accounts fail to capture that the interaction of weak adjunctswith modal operators underlies certain restrictions on the properties of the modal operators—anobservation that has not been discussed in the literature so far.Keywords: weak free adjuncts, semantic variability, as-phrases, temporal/modal operators.