12 adjoin

class in English (and similar kinds of criteria establish the class in other
languages): they can occur within the noun phrase, i.e. they function in the
attributive position, e.g. the big man; they can occur in a post-verbal or pre-
dicative position, e.g. the man is big; he called it stupid; they can be premodified
by an intensifier, such as very, e.g. the very big man; and they can be used in
a comparative and a superlative form, either by inflection (e.g. big, bigger,
biggest) or periphrastically (e.g. interesting, more interesting, most interesting).
However, not all adjectives satisfy all these criteria (e.g. major, as in a major
question, does not occur predicatively cf. *The question is major), and
the subclassification of adjectives has proved quite complex. Both narrow and
broad applications of the term adjective will be found in grammars. In its
broadest sense it could include everything between the determiner and the
noun, in such a phrase as the vicars fine old English garden chair; but many
linguists prefer to restrict it to the items which satisfy most or all of the above
criteria (to include only fine and old, in this example), the other items being
called adjective-like or adjectivals. Adjectives may also be the heads of phrases
(adjective or adjectival phrases (abbreviated AP or AdjP), such as thats very
important), and an adjectival function is sometimes recognized for certain types
of clause (e.g. hes the man I saw). See attributive, predicative.

adjoin (v.) see adjunction

adjunct (n.) A term used in grammatical theory to refer to an optional or

secondary element in a construction: an adjunct may be removed without the
structural identity of the rest of the construction being affected. The clearest
examples at sentence level are adverbials, e.g. John kicked the ball yesterday
instead of John kicked the ball, but not *John kicked yesterday, etc.; but other
elements have been classed as adjunctival, in various descriptions, such as
vocatives and adjectives. Many adjuncts can also be analysed as modifiers,
attached to the head of a phrase (as with adjectives, and some adverbs).
The term may be given a highly restricted sense, as when it is used in Quirk
grammar to refer to a subclass of adverbials. In X-bar syntax, an adjunct is
one of the major components of a phrasal category (the others being head,
complement and specifier).

adjunction (n.) A basic syntactic operation in transformational grammar

(TG) referring to a rule which places certain elements of structure in adjacent
positions, with the aim of specifying how these structures fit together in larger
units. In classical TG, several types of adjunction were recognized. In sister-
adjunction two elements were formally adjoined under a particular node and
thus became sister constituents of that node. For example, in one formulation
of the verb phrase, the negative particle was sister-adjoined to the elements
modal and tense, as in (a) below. (A different, but related, formal operation
was known as daughter-adjunction.) Chomsky-adjunction provided an altern-
ative way of handling this situation, and is now the only type of adjunction
recognized in government-binding theory. This suggestion involves adjoin-
ing an element to a node: a copy of this node is then made immediately above
it, as in (b) below. Each of the nodes in Chomskyan adjunction structure is