Implicit Adjuncts : The Cases of Degree Modifiers in Japanese and English

The issue of adjuncts has long been a neglected field of linguistic study whether it be syntactic or semantic. It is only in Pustejovsky (1995) that we find a brief mention of adjuncts. In addition to what the author calls true arguments, default arguments, and shadow arguments, he sets up a class of true adjuncts citing the following sentence, Mary drove down to new York on Tuesday. We will take up a small lexical item sugiru in Japanese, and we will argue that we should posit the notion of implicit adjuncts in describing the properties with the small Japanese lexical item sugiru. Throughout the discussions that follow we will demonstrate how the notion is independently motivated irrespective of what linguistic theory we are going to adopt.