First, sorry that I haven’t posted as much here as I’d intended to, the backlog is growing. The topic of this post is: what we did at 12:30 this afternoon. The reason for my posting this is just that not everything made it into the handouts, and also, the handouts were several.

For the papers that were referred to, check the readings page. I will just cite them here.

We started out with a regular handout, which mainly described the findings and proposals from Cinque (1999). The handout says “3a” at the top, but the date is right. This outlined the basic phenomenon of adverb ordering requirements using examples from English, and then discussed Cinque’s findings from French and Italian, as well as a sampling from the numerous other languages he investigated.

The handout ended with a couple of brief examples concerning adverbs in Malagasy, which was based on a paper by Rackowski & Travis (2000). At this point, we turned to look at a portion of an older handout from a different class on which I had drawn a tree structure illustrating Rackowski & Travis’ proposal. The version I posted here is trimmed a bit from the version I handed out, and has the correct date and course information at the top now.

We then turned our attention to English, where I was assisted by showing on the screen a homework assignment from a Syntax II class in which we had discussed the adverb ordering facts. Here again, I have fiddled with it a bit to remove some of the things that are irrelevant for our purposes here, but the main content we discussed is there. The upshots of the discussion here were: (a) English is actually quite a bit like Malagasy with respect to the adverb ordering facts, which we might take to mean that Malagasy is not as exotic as we thought, and (b) the analysis from the “olden days” of why the order of adverbs reverses after the verb might well qualify as a simpler way to understand the facts.

On that last point, I shouldn’t leave you with the impression that I’ve dismissed Cinque’s (1999) or Rackowski & Travis’ (2000) analyses as being too complicated—only that if we don’t make the assumptions that they make (specifically, the assumption that adverbs cannot “hang off the right side of the tree”), the effect falls out in a relatively uncomplicated way. There are reasons to suspect that adverbs actually can’t hang off the right side of the tree, and I hope to discuss those a bit more later on in the semester. In that case, the “snowball movements” that Cinque, Rackowski, and Travis propose are actually necessary. But, since we haven’t seen an argument yet for believing that, the simplest analysis we have available is probably one where adverbs can just attach to the tree hanging off either to the right or to the left, with an additional requirement that the order of attachment from the top of the tree to the bottom follows a fairly strictly-defined order.