Referentiality and factivity in adverbial adjunct processing

Abstract

This paper deals with adjunct processing of the type where/when/how/why, arguing in favor of a subdivision of these elements in two distinct classes, based on the application of a psycholinguistics test. The fact that such elements are adjuncts and not arguments is of great interest for parsing issues since it gives rise to structures with ambiguity in terms of the WH-adjunct trace origin. It is argued that syntactic restrictions play a crucial role for the interpretation of adjuncts in ambiguous sentences but the role and extent of influence of other semantic/pragmatic factors are also discussed.

referentiality; long wh-movement; binding; adjuncts; language processing