Adverbial Modifiers in Adjectival Passives

Abstract

The combination of adjectival passives with adverbial modifiers poses a problem for current adjectival conversion analyzes of the adjectival passive. An influential proposal by Kratzer ( 1994 , 2000 ) has been to explain the appearance of adverbial modifiers by assuming adjectival conversion not only at the lexical but also at the phrasal VP level. The present article develops an alternative account for the semantics of adjectival passives and their combination with adverbial modifiers and contrasts it with the verbal passive case. It takes adjectival passives in German to be a grammatical means for generating contextually shaped states of the subject referent that result from an (possibly complex) event type provided by the verb plus additional predicative material. The structural condition that allows adverbial modifiers to take part in the formation of the event type predicate is that they attach structurally low (V-adjuncts). The pragmatic condition is that they provide an informative restriction to the resulting state type. The article provides evidence from different domains of the grammar—prosody, syntax and semantics—that point to the particular structural status of adverbial modifiers in adjectival passives (V-adjuncts) as opposed to verbal passives (VP-adjuncts). These findings are corroborated by two psycholinguistic experiments that test the different syntactic and semantic status of adverbial modifiers in adjectival and verbal passives. On this basis, the article develops a compositional semantics for adjectival passives and their adverbial modifiers. In more general terms, the study provides an interesting test case for exploring the semantics of the verbal cluster in German.