Adverb classes and the nature of minimality

In this work, we report a new interaction pattern among adverb classes in the context of movement and examine the implications of this pattern with respect to Rizzi’s (1990, 2001) Relativized Minimality, Chomsky’s (1995) Minimal Link Condition, and Ernst’s (2002) Fact-Event Object Calculus. In Sect. 1, we review the relevant data in the literature. Our new contribution is reported in Sect. 2 using wh-movement and four sample adverb classes. Section 3 shows that the pattern holds for various other types of movement as well (neutral preposing, focalization, and clefting in English; scrambling in Russian). We also discuss the behavior of NPs, PPs, and verbal heads here. Section 4 focuses on the theoretical significance of the new facts. In Appendix A, we provide a more comprehensive demonstration of how various adverb classes obey the pattern established in Sects. 2–3. Appendix B is an actual sample of the verbal context we presented to our informants for soliciting subtle data.