The movement analysis of temporal adverbial clauses

Abstract

In the literature it has been proposed that temporal adverbial clauses can be derived bywh-movement of an operator (e.g.when) to the left periphery (Geis 1970, 1975; Enç 1987: 655; Larson 1987, 1990; Dubinsky & Williams 1995; Declerck 1997; Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria 2004: 165–70). After reviewing the arguments that have been proposed in favour of such a movement analysis, the article provides additional empirical evidence in support of the analysis. The data concern so-called Main Clause Phenomena (MCP) or Root phenomena, that is, syntactic phenomena such as argument fronting, Locative Inversion, preposing aroundbe, VP preposing and Negative Inversion, which in English are by and large restricted to main clauses. The unavailability of these MCP in temporal adverbial clauses follows directly from the movement account. The movement analysis will be extended to conditional clauses and factive clauses.