Re: Which part of speech?

Damian wrote:
<<
> So then how do you parse "last night" as an adverb?  Wouldn't
> it just be simpler (in the Occam's Razor sense) to assign a
> zero-derived case to every noun naming a day?
 >>

Simpler in what sense?  It would actually seem needlessly complicated
to me.

Chris wrote:
<<
Zero-derived case or null preposition--it depends on your theory of case
assignment, mostly. Minimalism prefers the latter, since the default
case
is usually called partitive and is found, I believe, mainly in
passives in
English. (In Tagalog, it's called oblique and found mainly in
antipassives.) So if you don't have the default case, you need to have a
case assigner, which would usually be a preposition in English. I'm not
sure which theories of grammar would use an inherent (I assume, at any
rate) case rather than providing a case assigner.
 >>

This is not theory independent, and neither is this:

Chris:
<<
But yes. In English, these are nouns
 >>

I'd say a more accurate way to characterize what Chris wrote above is
that, in English, these are *not* nouns (referring to "today",
"yesterday",
etc.)--or, at least, they're not nouns when they're adverbs.  They
can be
nouns, e.g.,

(a) Leave that work for tomorrow.

In (a), you can replace "tomorrow" with Betty, or some other noun that
makes sense (i.e., not "Leave that work for consternation", and, by the
same logic, "Leave that work for yesterday").  You can't do that with
a sentence like that in (b) or (c):

(b) I ate a cake yesterday.
(c) Yesterday I ate a cake.

A null preposition seems like a good idea, since you can replace
"yesterday"
in (b) with any prepositional phrase that makes sense.  However, in (c),
I get the distinct impression that you can't comfortably.  Compare
the two
below:

(d) I ate a cake on the lawn.  [eater is on the lawn]
(e) On the lawn I ate a cake.

Both are grammatical.  However, at least to me (and others can judge if
this is accurate), I get the sense that (b) and (c) are equally
neutral--one
is liable to utter either in isolation.  For the latter pair, though,
(d) is neutral,
and (e) is not.  There must be *some* kind of prompt to front the PP in
(e), whereas no prompting is needed to front the adverb in (c).
Also, if
you replace the locative PP with a manner PP, it gets worse:

(f) I cut the cake with a knife.  [instrumental reading]
(g) With a knife I cut the cake.

Again, both are grammatical, but I get the sense that (f) is neutral and
(g) definitely is not.

So while positing a null preposition does seem "attractive", it doesn't
seem to account for the data.  If there is no null preposition, then one
is forced to try to come up with an explanation for why certain nouns
get automatic case, but only in certain situations (e.g., in (a), the
preposition "for" would be assigning case to "tomorrow", under a
case-assigning theory).  Either that, or things like "tomorrow" don't
need to have case, and, hence, are adverbs.

Or, one can simply say that the English data doesn't need to be
accounted for, since it doesn't fit the theory.  That's a very popular
option.

See below for a paper contrasting -ly adverbs and temporal/locative
adverbs (in HTML form):

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?
hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&safe=off&q=cache:jvJaBsbEibUJ:www.sakura.cc.tsukuba.a
c.jp/~hidekazu/Paper/ly-adverb.pdf+temporal+adverbs+as+nouns

-David
*******************************************************************
"A male love inevivi i'ala'i oku i ue pokulu'ume o heki a."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

Reply