Adjuncts Meet Immediate Transfer and Restructuring

Abstract

Within the newly conceived framework of MERGE (Chomsky, Gallego, and Ott 2019), this study deduces the Adjunct Condition, which dictates that sub-extraction from adjuncts is strictly banned. However, the Adjunct Condition is empirically challenged by exceptional cases where extraction from non-finite adjuncts becomes legitimate. Given this background, the current paper proposes that adjuncts in general are immediately sent to Transfer to resolve a labeling conflict (i.e., problem of projection (POP)) that arises upon their insertion to the syntactic derivation; accordingly, the adjuncts at hand become inaccessible for further syntactic operations, effectively deriving the Adjunct Condition. However, there are exceptional cases where the island-hood of adjuncts is voided. We propose that such adjuncts are properly labeled in the mode of syntactic restructuring (cf. Choe 1988; Wurmbrand 2001) forming larger complex verb phrases with sister main verb phrases, which eventually meets the Single Event Condition (Truswell 2011) (cf. Kim and Park 2022a). Sub-extraction out of now one single event straightforwardly follows. All in all, this study explicates the peculiar property of extraction out of adjuncts by resorting to Transfer, Labeling, and Restructuring.