UC Santa Cruz

This paper investigates the syntactic structure created by adjunction by examining the viability of two competing hypotheses. The first hypothesis is that adjunction creates two separate phrases in the syntax, the host, and the maximal projection, its mother, which includes the adjunct and the host. The host of an adjunct is found to be generally unavailable to the syntactic processes of movement, ellipsis and coordination, but is seemingly available to antecede ellipsis. The second hypothesis, that adjunction results in a multi-segmented, complex single constituent in the sense of Chomsky (1986) and May (1985) is found to generally hold true under movement, ellipsis and, indirectly, coordination, because the host of the adjunct cannot be targeted by these processes independently of its adjunct sister.