The Status Of A In SVA At The Syntax-pragmatics Interface

According to traditional grammar, adverbials are just modifiers of the verbs in sentences. The traditional notion of subcategorization entails a clear distinction between arguments and adjuncts. The former are subcategorized, necessarily expressed nominal expressions, while the latter are optional, not always nominal expressions in a more loose relationship to the verbs. Accordingly, some grammarians exclude SVA out of the basic sentence patterns, considering SVA as a variant of SV pattern, in which the adverbials are optional. But a closer observation reveals that there do exist sentences in which the adverbials are obligatory, and that these sentences are obviously not of the SV pattern, but of the SVA pattern.In this thesis, it is argued that the subcategorization information provided by the verbs in SVA sentences is underspecified. Such verbs thus permit adjuncts to be integrated into the VP under the same structural relation as arguments, which accounts for the parallelism of arguments and adjuncts. Syntactically, the distinction between arguments and adjuncts needs to be blurred, and pragmatically, the adverbials after the underspecified verbs play an important role in contextual enrichment as well as in the concept formation of the verbs. The status of A (i.e. adjunct) in the SVA sentence pattern needs to be analyzed at the syntax-pragmatics interface.By analyzing the demerits of some syntactic hypotheses which try to solve the problem by introducing new categories, this thesis proves that the problem has not yet been satisfactorily solved within the syntactic framework, for the syntactic status of the A in SVA sentences cannot be adequately explained in these syntactic approaches.In this thesis, the syntactic status of the A in SVA will be revisited from the perspective of pragmatics, with relevance theory as the theoretical foundation. The relevance-theoretic notions of pragmatic enrichment and concept formation help to show that natural language expressions quite generally do not address fully specified concepts, but rather provide an instruction for the hearer to construct an occasion-specific concept which serves to derive particular occasion-specific inferential effects. Accordingly, it is postulated that adverbials in SVA sentences are necessary for contextual enrichment by providing information for pragmatic inference of concept formation of the verbs which are underspecified.In the model designed for interpreting underspecified verbs, it is well illustrated how structural syntactic processes and pragmatic inference interact in the process of utterance interpretation. It is concluded that the pragmatic necessity of the adverbials in SVA sentences supports their syntactic status, i.e. the status of the A in SVA can be fixed at the syntax-pragmatics interface.In the thesis, Chapter one declares the rationale and objectives of the study, and the organization of the thesis. Chapter two offers a brief review of relevance theory, as well as the studies on the distinction between arguments and adjuncts, and verbal underspecification. Chapter three presents two syntactic attempts to solve the controversy over the status of the A in SVA sentences, and then illuminates the demerits of these two hypotheses. In Chapters four and five, a detailed study is made on the status of the A in SVA at the syntax-pragmatics interface by employing relevance theory. The last chapter draws a conclusion of the study and highlights its significance. The limitations of the study and possible further research are also listed.