A Descriptive and Theoretical Study on Positions of Adverbs and Their Semantic Interpretation

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The purpose of this research is to examine the following problems and to try to answer them based on the previous studies in generative grammar, especially, principles-and-parameters approach of generative grammar :(i) what position are the adverbs or adjuncts given in the phrase or hierarchical structure of sentences?(ii) how do adverbs or adjuncts behave with respect to NP-movement, Wh-movement and LF-movement?(iii) how can adverbs or adjuncts be given proper semantic interpretation in sentences?The research during three years have shown the properties of English adverbs and adjuncts as follows :(i) The adverbs which are ambiguous in meaning with multiple uses of functions can be disambiguated by the elements which cooccur with them in sentences ; what can be involved with this kind of disambiguation are functional possibilities of individual adverbs, the meaning of the whole sentence in which an adverb appears, and the compatibility between the properties of adverbs and those of other elements which adverbs cooccur with.(ii) The positions in which adverbs occur in sentences and their syntactic or hierarchical status in sentences play an important role in disambiguating the ambiguity of multiple-use adverbs, and they are also significant for classifying sentence adverbs and predicate adverbs.(iii) While most of adverbs are used as optional elements in sentences, they have cooccurrence restrictions with other elements in sentences ; these cooccurrence restrictions are not only of great importance for assigning proper semantic interpretations to adverbs but they can also be generalized into licensing conditions of adverbs which explain that certain adverbs cannot be used in some sentences but they can in other sentences.