“Adverbs and functional heads” twenty years later: cartographic methodology, verb raising and macro/micro-variation

Abstract

Abstract Adverbs and Functional Heads: a Cross-Linguistic perspective (Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and functional heads: A cross-linguistic perspective. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press)—one of the founding works of “Syntactic Cartography”—combines some of the developments in Syntactic Theory from the 1980s and 1990s with insightful contributions from Linguistic Typology. This paper has two interrelated goals. First, it aims to review the fundamental theses of Cinque’s monography of 1999—which are far from controversial among scholars working in Cartography—; at the same time it provides conceptual support to them. Secondly, it aims to explore some methodological tools of Syntactic Cartography presented and discussed by Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and functional heads: A cross-linguistic perspective. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, namely the so-called precedence-and-transitivity tests—after a brief discussion on methodology used to recognise the functional categories, namely the criterion by Jackendoff, Ray. 1972. Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press—and the use of the hierarchies as tools to detect intra and interlinguistic variation. With regard to this latter issue, the paper gathers data from Brazilian Portuguese, Canadian English and Colombian Spanish on verb raising. The discussion of the data not only favours Cinque, Guglielmo. 2017. On the status of functional categories (heads and phrases). Language and Linguistics 18(4). 521–576 recent updates of his theoretical approach to the cartography of the clause but also shows how Cartography offers a natural scenario for a methodological approach to both micro and macro-variation.