8.8 Adjuncts
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We’ve been working at representing how phrases and sentences are organized in the mental grammar, and to do that we’ve been using x-bar theory, which claims that every phrase in every sentence in every language of the world is organized into an x-bar structure. An x-bar structure has a head, a bar-level and a phrase level. It might, optionally, have a complement phrase as the sister to the head and daughter to the bar-level. It might, optionally, have a specifier as sister to the bar level and daughter to the phrase level.
But as you’ve been drawing trees and thinking about how sentences are organized in your mental grammar, you might have encountered some kinds of sentences that don’t seem to fit into an x-bar structure. The X-bar structures that we’ve looked at so far have left out one element. The additional level of structure that we need is called an adjunct, and here’s what it looks like. What structural relationships do you notice? The adjunct is sister to the bar-level, but here’s something we haven’t seen before: it’s also daughter to a bar-level. This is an instance of recursion. A recursive structure is a structure that contains another structure inside it that has the same type as itself. Some linguists argue that recursion is a fundamental property of all human languages and that it’s one of the things that makes human languages different from all other species’ communication systems. Try to think of some other examples of recursive structures that we’ve already seen.
So if adjunction is recursive, you’ve probably already figured out that it can happen over and over again within a single phrase. Every time we add an adjunct as sister to the bar level, we add another bar-level as its mother, to which we could add another adjunct as its sister, which adds another bar level as its mother, and so on. So an x-bar phrase can have 0 or 1 complements, and it can have either 0 or 1 specifies, but because adjuncts are recursive, it could theoretically have an infinite number of adjuncts.
We’ve got a pretty clear idea of what complements do: they complete the meaning of a head. And the specifier position is a special position for subjects. So why do we need adjuncts? Well, like complements and specifiers, adjuncts are optional: a phrase might have one or more, or it might have no adjuncts. Adjuncts often add extra information that’s not totally necessary for the meaning of the sentence, the kind of information that’s often contained in APs or PPs, like where an event happened or how it happened. Because adjuncts are optional, they can often be moved or even removed altogether without changing the grammaticality of the sentence. And many adjuncts can appear on either side of their x-bar sister, whereas in English, complements pretty much always come after their sisters and specifiers come before. Let’s look at some examples of adjunct phrases.
In this sentence, Sam bought shoes yesterday, the phrase yeste