The Syntax of Adverbials and Information Structure

This paper aims to establish the grammatical relationship between the syntactic positions of S-adverbs and information structure. The crosslinguistic properties of S-adverbs are as follows: 1) S-adverbs have a focal stress only in a post-subject position; 2) S-adverbs cannot occupy a post-subject position when subject is focused; 3) S-adverbs in a pre-subject position are usually interpreted as topic. To analyze these properties, a new approach toward S-adverbs is attempted in this paper. This approach actively applies two important Minimalist theories, that is, Agree and phase. Under the Agree mechanism suggested here, the Probe C(0) carrying an uninterpretable feature[uF] seeks for its Goal containing an [iF]. By Agree, every S-adverb bearing an[iF] can be independently licensed by C(0), a phase head. On the other hand, under the phase-based focusing mechanism made in this paper, only the highest syntactic element(either subject or S-adverb) can receive a focal stress in the spellout domain of the CP phase (i.e.TP). In other words, the spellout domain is a focus domain for S-adverbs. Unless it has a focal stress, neither subject nor S-adverb can survive in the focus domain. For this reason, S-adverbs occurring in a pre-subject position are the outputs of anti-focus movement, and thus they are usually interpreted as topic.