The position of prepositional modifiers in the adverbial space

Abstract

In Schweikert (2005) I showed that prepositional sentence modifiers can be grouped into several classes according to the thematic role that they express (section 3). These thematic roles respect a base order analogous to that of Cinque‟s hierarchy of adverbs and functional heads (section 2). What was missing so far was the rela-tionship of two hierarchies. Here, I want to fill this gap, using scope interpretations of adverbs with respect to the prepositional modifiers (section 4). I will show that we can use these properties to detect the positions of the thematic roles inside the Cinque hierarchy. Section 5 will propose a possible derivation of surface order and scope properties.