PP-Extraposition and the Order of Adverbials in English

Abstract

In English, adverbials may intervene between the verb and a selected PP. We consider three analyses of this fact: The traditional account, that the PP shifts rightward across a right-adjoined adverbial (Stowell 1981); an alternative account, that the verb moves leftward across a left-adjoined adverbial (Pesetsky 1989, Johnson 1991); and 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 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 interaction with temporal only. The data then show that the symmetric account has the edge. Finally, we briefly discuss the implications of our findings for the analysis of the English VP, with a focus on the circumstances under which the verb moves.