Exercise 4.6 A. Here, courtesy of Ben Marrone, is a pair of trees for the following sentences:
- He read with much fervor over the summer.
- He read over the summer with much fervor.
B. Examples of syntactic adjuncts functioning as semantic arguments can be
constructed easily with verbs similar to rent, like buy or
sell. Here are a couple of other cases:
- During the holidays, Janet exchanges presents with Norweigans and Jane does
so with Nigerians.
- John searches the sky for omens but Mary does so for constellations.
The verb exchange, as used above, semantically requires two
participants, which can be expressed by the subject noun phrase, as in:
- Sarah and Greg exchanged addresses.
If no second argument is mentioned, then the sentence sounds odd or
exchange takes on a different sense:
- ??Sarah exchanged addresses.
However, as the do so test shows, the second participant, when expressed
by a PP, is an adjunct.Similarly, the verb search means "try to find"
and so implies a object of the search, but again, when the object of the search
is expressed as a PP, it is an adjunct.