Adverbial NPs: Bare or Clad in See-Through Garb?

Abstract

Larson 1985 develops an analysis of 'bare-NP adverbs' as in 1 in which certain NPs are able to appear in adverbial syntactic positions in virtue of a peculiarity of their head nouns:' (1) a. John arrived last week. b. They went that way. For Larson, week, way, and a number of other nouns have lexical entries containing a feature [ + F] that allows them to assign oblique Case to NPs of which they are the head; the difference between 2a and 2b is then that time is [ + F] while occasion is [ F] and accordingly only in 2a does the adverbial NP receive the Case marking that immunizes it against violation of the constraint against Case-less NPs: (2) a. I've gone there many times. b. *I've gone there many occasions. In addition, Larson (606) posits a rule of 'Adverbial 0-role assignment' that says, 'Assign an adverbial 0-role to x, where a is any phrase,' and lists roles OTime, OLoc, ODir, and OManner as assignable by this rule. In the course of his paper, Larson briefly takes up and rejects one specific version of an alternative approach to adverbial NPs. The alternative approach treats them as PPs having no overt preposition, and the specific version of it that he considers is one that he attributes to Bresnan & Grimshaw 1978,2 which involves a fairly baroque apparatus that posits phonologically zero deep structure prepositions, a rule deleting such zero elements, and a constraint excluding their occurrence in surface structure. The particular arguments that he offers against an analysis of adverbial NPs as PPs are metatheoretical rather than empirical3 ('the assumptions and devices that it invokes are ad hoc and theo-

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