Towards a unified account of adjuncts

Abstract

We present an analysis of adjuncts which, while based on the traditional binary adjunction schema, accommodates the phenomena that motivate the alternative Adjunct-as-Complement approach, such as adjunct extraction and case marking. The key idea is to enable the syntactic head (modifiee) to select for its modifier (adjunct) via the new valence feature dedicated for adjuncts, while leaving its values underspecified. Thus the selectional property of the modifiee percolates as well as that of the modifier, dispensing with the need to endow adjuncts a complement-like status.