The dual analysis of adjuncts/complements in Categorial Grammar

Abstract

The distinction between COMPLEMENTS and ADJUNCTS has a long tradition in grammatical theory, and it is also inc1uded in some way or other in most current forrnallinguistic theories.But it is a highly vexed distinction, for several reasons, one of which is that no diagnostic criteria have emerged that will reliably distinguish adjuncts from complements in all cases -two many examples seem to "fall into the crack" between the two categories, no matter how theorists wrestle with them.In this paper, I will argue that this empirical diagnostic "problem" is, in fact, precisely what we should expect to find in natural language, when a proper understanding of the adjunctlcomplement distinction is achieved: the key hypothesis is that a complete grammar should provide a DUAL ANALYSIS of every complement as an adjunct, and potentially, an analysis of any adjunct as a complement.What tltis means and why it is motivated by linguistic evidence will be discussed in detail.1 The Starting Points: Initial Intuitions about the Phenomena, and a Theoretical Framework to work from.1.1 The Pre-Theoretic Notion of 'Adjunct' vs. 'Complement'I will begin with some basic, intuitive, characteristics that have motivated linguists to draw the adjunctJcomplement distinction over the years, whatever their theory (if any) of these categories differ.That is, we start from common pre-theoretic notions of how adjuncts differ from complements, and proceed to build a formal account that, as first goal, satisfies these:Dual Analysis 01 Adjuncts/ComplementsGrammar 2 (heneeforth: CG) that offers a partieularly direct and eompelling way of implementing this hypothesis: beeause of the tight conneetion between syntaetie analysis and compositional semanties in CG (whieh is stronger than in any other eurrent theory), we can show within CG that many of the semantie properties of the adjunetJeomplement distinetion follow direetly from the syntactie CG eharaeterization of adjunetJeomplement (andlor viee-versa).For this reason, we need to explain some assumptions, familiar within CG for a long time now (cf.(Venneman & Harlow 1977)), as to how the basic distinction is characterized in that theory; these are stated further below in (2) .But for this, in turn, we first need to review the way categories are named and are combined to form constituents in CG:(I) a.Standard definitions of syntactic categories: these include both PRIMITIVE CATE-GORIES, denoted by simple symbols (usually only these three: S, N (common nouns), and NP), and COMPLEX CATEGORIES, formed (recursively) from a pair of more basic categories by "/" and "\"; e.g.SIN?, NP\S, S/S, SI (NP\Sj, ete.) b.How groups of syntactic categories are put together to form constituents: AI B + B =? A. ("Where A and B stand for any categories, a category with a name of the form 'AlB' will combine with a category named 'B', to its right, to form a phrase '[AlB B)' of category 'A' ".Cf. a (nearly) equivalent phrase structure rule A -t AI B B".(This rule-schema is called the Functional Application Rule Schema, also known as Slash Elimination and as "The L-rule for I".)Note that where the slash direction is reversed, (AI B vs. B\A) the left-right order in

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