ADJACENCY

1. (Syntax) 

   Adjacency
   X is adjacent to Y iff for all Z such that X precedes Z and Z precedes Y, the PHON attribute of Z has the value Ø, or Z is a copy of a moved item marked for deletion.

    | Neil Myler, 2023
2. (Syntax) Two elements are adjacent if they are next to each other in the surface string without any intervening material. This notion is relevant to Case assignment, at least in English:
   1. John wrote a letter yesterday.
   2. * John wrote yesterday a letter.
    The NP a letter must be adjacent to its Case assigner wrote, as in (1). If any material intervenes, as in (2), the adjacency requirement on Case assignment is not met, hence the NP cannot be assigned case so that it violates the case filter, and the sentence is ungrammatical.
    One distinguishes string adjacency from structure adjacency depending on whether the relation "next to each other" applies to a string or to structure. (Chomsky 1981) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001

ADJUNCT
(Syntax) Or, adjunctival, or, adverbial adjunct, or, adjunct adverbial, or, optional adverbial. A word, phrase, or clause—usually an adverbial—that is integrated within the structure of a sentence or clause (unlike a disjunct) and yet can be omitted without making the sentence ungrammatical.
 Adjunct is defined in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics (2007) as "[a]ny element in the structure of a clause which is not part of its nucleus or core. E.g., in I will bring it on my bike tomorrow, the nucleus of the clause is I will bring it; the adjuncts are on my bike and tomorrow."

1. By tomorrow it'll be against the law for the boys to march along the county road. (John Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle, 1936)
2. "The judge spoke up quickly and for the first time looked Albert squarely in the eye." (Willa Cather, "Double Birthday", 1929)
3. An ancient craft that has been almost completely forgotten in the West is basket making.
4. Janey ... is standing there with her eyes wide open in amazement. She looks like she is the one who almost got hit in the head with a frozen duck. (Kelly Harms, The Good Luck Girls of Shipwreck Lane, 2013)

ADJUNCT CONTROL

1. (Syntax) The referential relation between the implicit (PRO) subject of a non-finite adjunct clause and its understood antecedent. Adjunct control is often assumed to involve a syntactic Obligatory Control (OC) dependency, as in (1), but some adjuncts also permit what is referred to as Non-Obligatory Control (NOC), as in (2), where PRO refers to some unnamed entity.
   1. OC
      a. Temporal Adjunct
      a. Holly₁ went to bed [ after PRO₁ drinking some milk ].
      b. Rational clause
      b. August₁ sat on the couch [ in order PRO₁ to read some library books ].
   2. NOC
      a. The food tasted better [ after PRO drinking milk ].
      b. The book was checked out from the library [ in order PRO to read it ].
    Even in adjuncts where both OC and NOC are possible, OC is often strongly preferred. | Jeffrey Jack Green, 2018
2. (Syntax) The referential relation between the null (PRO) subject of a non-finite adjunct and its understood antecedent, as in the temporal adjunct in (1) or the rationale clause (RatC) in (2).
   1. The window_i broke [ after PRO_i being hit with a rock ].
   2. This book_i was written [ in order PRO_i to be read ].
    | Jeffrey J. Green, 2019

ADJUNCT OBLIGATORY CONTROL
See ADJUNCT CONTROL.

ADJUNCTION
(Syntax) One of the two types of movement operation, the other being substitution. Traditionally, there are two types of adjunction:

1. Chomsky-adjunction, which results in a structure like this:

         Yi+1
         /\
        /  \
       /    \
      X      Yi+1
             /\
            /  \
           /    \
          Z      Yi
       
   

2. Sister-adjunction, which results in a structure like this:

          Yi+1
         /|\
        / | \
       /  |  \
      X   Z   Yi+1
   
   

ADJUNCTION SITE
(Examples)

• (Syntax) When we extract the embedded object into the matrix, the NOC (Non-Obligatory Control) reading goes away, and OC (Obligatory Control) is required:
  1. [ Which meeting ]_k were they_i too angry [ PRO_{i / * j} to hold t_k ] ?
     ✓ OC Reading: The people who are to hold the meeting are too angry to do so.
     ✗ NOC Reading: Some group of people A is too angry for some other discourse-salient group B to hold a meeting.
   The first reading involves a relatively low adjunction site where the adjunct clause is c-commanded by the matrix subject (Chomsky 1986). The second reading has a higher adjunction site, where such c-command does not hold.
   The movement operation has c-command as a precondition, and it is thus not possible in the high-adjunction structure (presumably because the high adjunction site is not c-commanded by the landing site for movement in the matrix clause): movement thus diagnoses the low adjunction structure. What (1) shows, then, is that such a structure also forces OC and rules out NOC. | Sandhya Sundaresan, 2023
• (Tree Adjoining Grammar) The utterance in (1a) presupposes both (1b) and (1c).
  1. a. John stopped beating Bill's wife.
     b. ill has a wife.
     c. John used to beat Bill's wife.
   ... Because we work from the bottom-up, we can assume that the PSN tree for John has a wife already exists, and its root node is of type t. It is not until the "stop" tree in SEM, denoted stop_SEM, tries to adjoin that we immediately have an issue. This auxiliary tree must have some way to encode both the sense of used to as well as have a site for the pre-existing presupposition. As it currently stands, stop_PSN must adjoin onto a copy of the tree into which the corresponding "stop" tree adjoined in SEM. This suggests that the root of the stop_PSN tree should be t. However, this tree only has one adjunction site but needs to accommodate two different trees. | Elizabeth Athena Braun, 2019
• (Tree Adjoining Grammar) The Type 4 completor rule unifies the top feature structure of the root of the auxiliary tree with the top feature structure of the adjunction site. In addition, it ensures that on completion of an adjunction at node η, the bottom feature structure of η is reassigned to the bottom feature structure labeling the root of the auxiliary tree. | Claire Gardent and Shashi Narayan, 2015
• (Syntax) Of course we do not want to allow Adjuncts to adjoin at arbitrary positions in the tree, so suppose that the set of adjunction sites is limited such that the node being adjoined to must contain a node that the Adjunct could adjoin to. For the example under discussion, how would be allowed to adjoin to Spec,CP because it is a VP-adjunct and the CP contains a VP. | Thomas Graf, 2013
• (Syntax) The various adjunction analyses proposed in the literature differ in the details of the adjunction sites. May (1985) and Kayne (1984) assume postverbal adverbials to be adjoined to the VP (1a). Ernst (1994) claims that adverbials are VP-internal, but they are structurally superior to the arguments in a binary, left-branching V-projection (1b). The opposite option—an analysis of adverbs as structural complements—has been introduced by Larson (1988) and taken up by Stroik (1990): They assign postverbal adverbs to the most deeply embedded positions in a V-projection (1c) consisting of VP shells.
  1. a. [ _Vmax [ _Vmax ... ] Adv ]
     b. [ _Vmax [ _V′ [ _V′ V⁰ DP ] Adv ] Adv ]
     c. [ _Vmax ... [ _V⁰ Adv ] ]
   | Hubert Haider, 2000
• (Syntax) Example (1) demonstrates that S-adverbs must always appear to the left of a VP-adverb in the preverbal position. This follows from (2) and (3) because an adjunction to (the topmost) VP will always be above a V′ adjunction site.
  1. a. Hulk Hogan [evidently]_S [completely]_VP annihilated his opponent.
     b. * Hulk Hogan [completely]_VP [evidently]_S annihilated his opponent.
  2. Syntactic Distribution of S-Adverbs
     a. left adjunction to IP
     b. left adjunction to I′
     c. left adjunction to the topmost VP
  3. Syntactic Distribution of VP-Adverbs
     a. left or right adjunction to main verb V′
   | Eric Potsdam, 1999
• (Principles and Parameters) I propose that adverbs are predicates subcategorizing for their arguments at D-S. Like other predicates in English, adverbs are generated on the right of their subjects. ...
   The AdvP can move to the left, either through substitution to an empty X′ adjunction site or through adjunction to an XP. | Louise Manga, 1992

ADMIRATIVE

1. (Grammar) Albanian has a series of verb forms called miratives or admiratives. These may express surprise on the part of the speaker but may also have other functions, such as expressing irony, doubt, or reportedness (Friedman 1980). The Albanian use of admirative forms is unique in the Balkan context. It is not translatable in other languages. | Wikipedia, 2023
2. (Grammar) The use of the admirative in Albanian is well known. It is formed by placing the auxiliary kam after the verb:
   1. kam pa 'I have seen'
   2. pakam 'I see to my astonishment'
   3. raka shi 'I see (but did not know it before) that it is raining'
    On reading Cerkovski's Ljudi Mladi a short time ago I was struck by some passages which greatly reminded me of the use of the perfect in Albanian in a present tense. I soon found further examples in the course of my reading and discovered in conversation with Bulgarians that the admirative is quite usual in Bulgarian.
   4. Boško is a simple, taciturn and heavy peasant lad. He is spoken to by a girl and makes a rather long reply. Astonished at his loquacity she exclaims:
      Ма чуйте! Бошко знаял да хортува!
      'Hullo, Boško can talk after all!'
    Here, 'can' is rendered by the perfect знаял.
   5. When Boško laughs at the question whether he has a sweetheart, a girl exclaims in wonderment:
      Ма сестро, чуй ма Бошко имал либе!
      'I say, sister, Boško has a sweetheart.'
   6. Виш� Бошко имал свирка!
      'Look, Boško has a pipe, too!'
    Now this имал is the admirative, used here just as in Albanian. | Gustav Weigand, 1923

ADPOSITION
(Syntax) A cover term for prepositions and postpositions. It is a member of a closed set of items that:

1. Occur before or after a complement composed of a noun phrase, noun, pronoun, or clause that functions as a noun phrase.
2. Form a single structure with the complement to express its grammatical and semantic relation to another unit within a clause.

AFFECTEDNESS
(Semantics) Semantically, affecting predicates have been defined as predicates that describe an action that concretely affects the direct object "in the sense of changing or moving it" (Egerland 1998), so that the affected argument "acquires some characteristic as a result of it" (Anderson 1977). Thus, examples like Helen killed the cockroach or Peter kicked the ball contain affected predicates, whereas a sentence like Helen observed the stars does not contain an affected predicate, given that the stars do not undergo a change of state of any kind as a result of Helen's observation.
 Alternative, broader characterizations of affectedness are also available. Tenny (1992) defines the notion of affected argument in aspectual terms, as the argument that "measures out and delimits the event described by the verb." Expressions like John ate an apple or John performed the play are "affected" in the sense that the direct objects delimit the event or provide an endpoint after which the action described by the verb does not continue.
 Roberts (1987) defines accomplishments as those verb phrases having internal Themes. An internal Theme, in turn, is defined as an argument that undergoes a change of state, a change of state occurring when "some property of the Theme held before the time with respect to which the proposition is evaluated and fails to hold after that time, or vice-versa." | Casilda García de la Maza, 2014

AFFIX SUPPORT

1. (Grammar) 

   Affix Support
   If any head is an affix, there must be metrical structure in the direction in which it attaches.
   I.e., An affix must, in the syntactic representation, be adjacent to material with metrical structure in the direction of affixation.

    Material that can satisfy this requirement includes:
   • Maximal projections.
   • Predictable word-internal metrical boundaries.
   • Agreement clitics.
    | Norvin Richards, 2017
2. (Grammar) In Contiguity Theory, certain principles of phonology require affixes to be prosodically supported: the requirement Affix Support demands the presence of a metrical boundary in the direction in which an affix attaches.
    In languages such as Italian and Spanish, verbal stress reliably provides such a boundary to the immediate left of the suffixal tense morpheme. This is not the case in languages like English and French, which only compute the metrical structure of the verb once it is inflected; consequently, affix support must be satisfied by merging some XP to the edge of T.
    Affix Support allows for a reduction of EPP effects to independent parameters: head-directionality, the morphological status of T, and the presence or absence of metrical boundaries between T and the verb. For instance, in a head-initial language with prefixal T (e.g. Greek), no EPP effects obtain, since nothing is required to precede T. By contrast, in a head-initial language with suffixal T (e.g. French), EPP effects will obtain unless verbs provide the relevant metrical support (e.g. Spanish). A head-final suffixal T, like final heads in Contiguity Theory generally, requires "untethering" (delinearization) of T and vP, which abrogates the metrical support for T otherwise provided by vP. This motivates EPP effects in Japanese. | Norvin Richards, 2017

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