Which syntax, incidentally for the incident adverbs?

Abstract

Taking our data from French, we study the properties of 'incidental adverbs', which set them apart from ordinary, integrated adverbs and briefly show how to integrate them into the grammar. Incidentality is a property of the occurrence of items rather than a property of lexical items proper. There is no correlation with specific semantic classes, or a specific pragmatic behavior. Incidental adverbs can be parenthetical or not, that is, they fail to contribute, or do contribute, to the main content of the proposition. What defines them is their prosodic status, although their phonological realization is not unique. This status is correlated with distributional and scopal properties. Crucially, incidental adverbs cannot be seen as outside grammar, since their occurrence is syntactically constrained : they may not occur inside one of the consituents of the sentence (except for the VP), and it is not the case that incidental and integrated adverbs can occur indifferently in all positions. We adopt a version of phrase structure grammar, where the tectogrammatical structure (for constituency and grammatical functions) is distinguished from the phenogrammatical structure (for word order). In this perspective, they can be analyzed as adjuncts to the sentence, and linearized freely at the beginning, or the end of the sentence, or between the sentential constituents.