Adverbs and adverbials in contemporary Arabic syntax: A phase-based account

2.1 Syntax-driven approach

The feature-based approach, also known as the cartographic theory, as proposed by Cinque (1994), is essentially based on the works of Kayne (1994) and Rizzi (1997) and relies mostly on syntactic mechanisms. Kayne (1994), in his well-known LCA, argued that a linear representation is derived from a hierarchical representation via the asymmetric c-command relation (pp. 5–12). According to this proposal, the head can only take one specifier, while the adjunction is blocked or not allowed.

In relation, Cinque (1999) assumed a universal hierarchy of adverbs, which argues that adverbs have a fixed order as specifiers of functional heads (aspecto-temporal or modal) rather than adjuncts. This conclusion was based on data from various languages, including English, French, Hebrew, and Chinese. Adverbs, according to this proposal, are structurally classified into lower adverbs and higher adverbs. He further posited that lower adverbs appear in the lower parts of a sentence, usually in the position before the verb, whereas the higher adverbs appear in a higher position, close to the functional heads. Since auxiliaries can also have a rigid order, this cartographic approach expects a rigid order among adverbs and these auxiliaries in the canonical structure. To account for other surface orders, this approach adopts three types of movements (Ernst 2014). The first movement involves the movement of adverbs to sentence-initial positions, such as topic, focus, or other pragmatic-related processes. The second movement is the head movement. The third type of movement is more complex (roll-up movement, in Ernst’s term) to some extent, because it requires multiple movements to derive the surface structure of rigid orders. Therefore, the work of Cinque (1999) and relevant studies accounted for post-verbal adverbs. However, participant preposition phrases (PPs) are less clarified, although, in Cinque (2004) and Schweikert (2005), these participant PPs are treated as normal adverbs licensed by fixed functional heads in relation to particular adverbial meanings.

Cinque’s (1999, 2004) proposal is systematically tested against adverbs displacement in various languages, e.g. Brazilian Portuguese (Tescari Neto 2013), English (Zyman 2012, Payne 2018), Hindi (Bhatia 2006), and Turkish (Wilson and Saygın 2001). However, there noted several empirical problems against this proposal. For instance, based on corpus data and large-scale acceptability judgements, Payne (2018) observed that Cinque’s (1999) hierarchy lacks some crucial ordering. Based on semantic categories, Payne (2018) proposed five classes of adverb hierarchy to account for such orderings. These classes are as follows: evaluative/speaker-oriented adverbs (apparently and frankly), epistemic adverbs (probably and perhaps), tense & aspectual adverbs (already, no longer, still, almost and once), frequency & degree adverbs (always, never, rarely, actually, really and very), and manner adverbs (neatly and quickly) (p. 17).

Ernst (2014) did a two-fold summary of the main critique against the Cinquean approach. (a) The notion of a universal mandatory order of functional heads does not predict the zones of adverbs. This notion is not based on any empirical grounds. For example, in Cinque (1999), modal heads precede aspectual heads, and two of these heads precede the heads that host manner and degree adverbs, which thus, might be ordered differently. There is no common generalization about the scope of behaviour for adverbs allowing free alternate zones, and the same applies to the free order of participant PPs (Ernst 2002). (b) Another major critique against cartographic theories comes from the roll-up movement, as argued by Ernst (2014). According to Bobaljik (2002), Bobaljik and Jonas (1996), and Ernst (2002), this movement does not guarantee the derivation of underlying structures without the loss of restrictiveness (p. 120). As it is commonly assumed in generative syntax, the movement of any constituent outside its domain requires empty functional heads that create a landing site for feature-checking requirements, which in turn, provide a specifier position as the targeted position. Overall, considering the wide variety of adverb orders across languages, studies based on the Kaynean proposal may not account for such a flexible variation. Such studies mostly proliferated the functional heads (Cinque’s (1999) proposal as an example), such as a Functional Phrase or Word order Phrase, to account for the flexible distribution of adverbs. If these functional projections corresponded to certain morphological or phonological requirements, then these heads must be specified (Kremers 2005, 2009). These points were addressed in Ernst (2002, 2014, 2020) and were the points of departure for the current proposal. The most direct question to be addressed is how to account for the flexible order of adverbials in Arabic without proliferating unspecified heads or assuming unnecessary movements. More precisely, how and where different types of adverbials in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) are introduced into syntactic structures.

2.2 Semantics-driven approach

The semantics-driven approach, also known as the scopal approach or adjunction approach, was initially proposed by Jackendoff (1972) and was later extended by Bellert (1977), Ernst (1984, 2002, 2007, 2009), Haider (2000, 2004), Kaufman (2006), and Alexiadou et al. (2009), amongst others. The core notion of scopal theories is that adverbials of all types adjoin freely (except the negative adverb, not) in phrase structures as far as the syntax is concerned, or else, their distribution is determined by their semantic and morphological (prosody and length, for example) constraints (Ernst 2002, Haider 2000). Under this free adjunction, their possible positions (zones) are determined by the semantics and their weight^[1] (heavy or light). Ernst (2002, 2009, 2014) argued that the structure and meaning of adverbials are governed by the “Fact Event Object^[2]” calculus of the Logical Form (LF), in which the lexicosemantic requirements of adverbs are specified. Thus, adverbs are classified into predicational adverbs, functional adverbs, and participant adverbials. Accordingly, Ernst proposed the following five-level hierarchy, as in (1), while Haider suggested the three-level hierarchy, as in (2).

The significant generalisation derived from (1) and (2) is that verb-oriented modifiers must merge with verbs before moving to subject-oriented or other event-modifier positions and that sentence-oriented modifiers are only possible when this stage is completed (Ernst 2014). In this way, a rigid order can be accounted for by specifying zones for different types of adverbs, although there is a distinct possibility of two adverbs of the same type occurring in the same zone, for example, ‘occasionally’ and ‘willingly’, as in (3).

Weight considerations are also used in some scopal analyses to account for restrictions in terms of ‘heavy and light’ semantic scope. Heavy adverbs tend to appear in the right periphery, following the verbs in head-initial languages, while light adverbs cannot (Ernst 2014). The same goes for reorderable post-verbal adverbs, in which heavier elements tend to be in the right when more than one adverb has a similar semantic function as in the following (4).

The general notion of free adjunction allows adverbials to be either in a complementary or in a specifier direction of the head via the head-direction parameter (Ernst 2002), thereby suggesting that adverbials are pre-verbal adjuncts in OV languages and are pre-verbal or post-verbal in VO languages (Ernst 2002); however, Haider (2004) claimed the opposite for VO languages.

Movement is another syntactic mechanism that affects adverbs. In simple cases, head movement is allowed, while for discourse purposes, Aʹ-movement is allowed, although other versions of scopal theories permit the right adjunction to account for the word order, concentric scope, and concentric constituency of sentences directly in the phrase structure, without movements (Ernst 2014, 122). The free adjunction noted above also suggests that verb-modifying adverbials may have the order as in (5), wherein the adverb can optionally precede or follow the verb, while sentence-modifying adverbs appear at the leftmost of the sentence, as in (6).

Scopal theories have outlined many generalisations concerning the distribution of adverbials without movements, proliferated projections, and stipulated parameters on movement. The difference between a rigid and flexible order in scopal theories is accounted for similarly by the semantic properties of the adverbs. Thus, alternative orders may result if the scope constraints, selection requirements, or further semantic properties are not violated, although this alternative order may present different readings. Some versions of scopal theories that adopt the right adjunction have outlined a straightforward account that predicts the constituent structure more directly. Maienborn and Schäfer (2019) classified adverbials based on their semantics into predicational, participant, and functional adverbs. Predicational adverbs include sentential and verb-oriented adverbs. Sentential adverbs, in turn, include subject-oriented, speaker-oriented, and domain/frame adverbs. Speaker-oriented adverbs include speech-act, epistemic, and evaluative adverbs (Maienborn and Schäfer 2019, 13).

6.1 Adverb classification in Arabic and their semantic scope

In this subsection, we provide linguistic data on how the traditional semantic classification in Arabic partially established the relationship between the semantics and the syntax. The majority of the literature on adverbs and adverbials classifies adverbials in Arabic into four classes. These four groups include degree, manner, time, and place adverbials (Ryding 2005, Al-hawary 2011, Schulz 2004). Degree adverbials, also known as degree modifiers or intensifiers, are adverbs or adverbial phrases that modify adjectives, adverbs, or other expressions to indicate the intensity, extent, or degree of something. They typically express how much or to what extent a quality or action occurs. They always tend to occur towards the end of the clause or the phrase they modify. Examples of such a semantic class of adverbials are faqaT ‘only’, jidd-an ‘very’, kathiir-an ‘much’, tamaam-an ‘completely’, etc.

Manner adverbials describe the manner, the state, the circumstances, or the condition, in which something takes place, therefore providing more options for describing these aspects. The semantic class of manner adverbials include demonstrative pronouns such as haakadhaa ‘thus; in such a way; and so’, nouns and adjectives in accusative case form such as fawr-an ‘immediately’, jamiiʕ-an ‘together’, circumstantial accusative such as musriʕ-an ‘quickly’, cognate accusative such as faraH-an shadiid-an ‘extremely happy’ and some prepositional phrases which function as adverbials such as bi-surʕat-in ‘quickly’. All these manner adverbials follow their modified elements except demonstrative pronouns which precede their modified elements as follows. Structurally, manner adverbials usually follow the predicate and thus fall within the vP layer or any other predicate phrase below CP.

Adverbials of place in Arabic include deictic locatives such as hunaa ‘here’ and its variants which generally indicate locative, direction, and existence. This class of adverbials also includes hayth-u ‘where’ which is used to connect one clause with another to indicate the concept of ‘where; in which’ in relation to the clause it modifies. It also includes accusative adverbial of place that typically denote direction or location such as yamiin-an ‘right’, yasaar-an ‘left’, and other locative adverbs such as taHt-a ‘under’. Adverbials of place in Arabic tend to appear towards the end of the phase or the clause. However, they can appear at the beginning of the sentences in the topic structures.

Adverbials of time indicate the time frame and come in four categories: adverbs of time, accusative nouns and adjectives, time demonstrative expressions, and other adverbial phrases. Examples of adverbs of time include amss ‘yesterday’, alʔaan-a ‘now’, baʕd-u ‘still; yet’, examples of accusative nouns and adjectives such as ʔabad-an ‘never’, Hadiith-an ‘recently’, respectively. Time demonstrative expressions include dhaak-a ‘that’ and its variants such as ʔaan-a dhaak-a ‘at that time’, ʔidhin ‘that’ and its variants such as yawm-a ʔidhin ‘on that day’.

In fact, many more classes of adverbials do not fit into these four traditional classes of adverbials. These include, first, numerical adverbials such as ʔawwala-n ‘first; firstly’ and all sequence points expressions. Second, adverbials of specification (al-tamyiiz in Arabic term) such as siyaasiy-an ‘politically’, third, adverbials of motion, cause, or reason such as natiijat-an ‘as a result’, and last, speech act adverbs such as marHab-an ‘hello’. Therefore, the traditional semantic categories of adverbs and adverbials in Arabic partially predict places of adverbials. Similarly, Sawaie (2015) found that adverbs of different types in Arabic generally occur after or close to the verb they modify. However, they are quite free in terms of their mobility for stylistic and highlighting purposes. Note the following example for emphasis variation.

6.2 Adverbial modification domain

Before we discuss these two proposed classes of adverbials in Arabic, in the following examples, we show how the modification domain^[7] can give some partial information about their attachment sites in the structure of the clause or the phrase.

6.3 Lower adverbials

The class lower adverbials include subject-modifying, verb-modifying, or any other adverbial type that has a narrow scope and adjoins the vP layer of the articulated clausal structure. Subject-modifying adverbials describe the speaker’s evaluation of some quality about the subject referent or indicate the subject’s mental attitude (Ernst 2002, 2014, Frey 2003). Their attachment is partly free, either before or after the verb. Thus, they are held to be vP layers or predicational adverbials. Verb-modifying adverbials are process or event modifiers. They can be further subdivided semantically into frequency, degree, and manner. Examples of verb-modifying and subject-modifying adverbials are given in (32).

Despite verb-oriented and subject-oriented being distinguishable in terms of their semantic scope; they both belong to the same class as lower (vP) adverbials, from the fact they both cannot climb over the vP layer to the higher layer. We used the X-bar theoretic schema to distinguish between set-merge – argument-merge and pair-merge – adjunction. In other words, the distinction is made between the specifier, complement, and adjunct merger using the notions of the X-bar theory. Although different accounts have been used for this type of distinction (whether adjuncts attached to XP or Xʹs), there is a common consensus that the output of the adjunction keeps the labeling or the constituency intact. This entails that adverbial attaches to the maximal projection rather than any other projection. For a concrete discussion, note the difference between an adjunction and a merge in the following (33).

The schematic representation in (33a) demonstrates the following standard properties of adverbials’ adjunction. First, their adjunction preserves intact the information related to intermediate-level (bar-level) and maximal projections, categories, and headedness, while a complement does not. Second, the adverbial modifiers receive intermediate-level information about the structure it modifies. Finally, the number of adverbial adjuncts is not limited (Hornstein 2009, Hornstein and Nunes 2008). Van de Koot (1994), Adger (2003), Ackema (2015), and Barbu and Toivonen (2016) provided more discussion on the differences between adjunct and argument mergers. Since there is no limitation on the number of adverbial adjuncts, the adjunction of lower adverbials is partly free within their modification domain. Their free attachment within the zones noted in (7) and the recursion that they allow are the common properties of adjuncts. Lower adverbials attach to pre or post-object (34) and (35) or adjectival positions as in (36) and (37).

The manner adverbial jayyidan ‘perfectly’ in (34) and (35) and the degree adverbial tamaam-an ‘completely’ in (36) and (37) are distributed in two different positions, before the object and at the end of the sentence following the object or the adjective. However, jayyidan and tamaam-an have the same semantic scope, in that they both modify the verb or the adjective. It is in these positions that these adverbials receive their Case and interpretation via the c-command relation (Fehri 1997, 1998), in which the adjunction can be to the right or the left. It was also observed in Jackendoff (1972) that these lower adverbials in some other languages can occur in different orders with different meanings and perhaps scopes. This is commonly noted in English and other European languages as follows (Ernst 2002, 42).

The semantics of the adverbial cleverly in (38) is ambiguous to some extent in that it has both the manner and subject-oriented reading in each of the referred examples. Adverbials in Arabic, however, do not show this ambiguous characteristic. A lower adverbial, as suggested in this study, can be either a subject-oriented modifier or a manner modifier, but not a mixture of both (Fehri 1998, Ryding 2005 for further discussion). Contrast the following examples.

The manner adverbial jayyidan ‘perfectly’ in (39a) means that the speaker has studied every part of the book, whereas the alternative order in (39b) means that he/she has studied some part of the book (not necessarily the entire book). Thus, (39a) has the English paraphrased version as “the speaker studies the entire book” while (39b) can be paraphrased as “the speaker studied some parts of the book” (Fehri 1997, 19). Both instances indicate the manner of study, whether it’s partially or completely. Such a stylistic variation is also noted between (36) and (37), in which (36) entails a complete absent and (37) a partial absent at least at the time of the speech. In this case, the variation in the interpretation is the main determinant of its position. The association between the semantic scope of the adverb and its syntactic position, especially within the lower class is also noted by (Morzycki 2016). Thus, in Arabic, subject-oriented adverbials are hierarchically higher than manner adverbials. As noted above, lower adverbials are distributed freely within the vP phase and, thus, have different structures. The structure in (40) is proposed for post-object adverbials like the one in (35), with its counterpart labelled bracketing of the vP shell in (41), which shows that lower adverbials are vP-internal adverbs.

Given the structure in (40), a reasonable question would be concerning how the structure building would proceed. Following Larson (1988, 1990), Hale and Keyser (1991, 1993a, 1993b, 1994), and Chomsky (1995), the derivation in (40) would proceed as follows. The verb, samiʕ-tu ‘listened’ is merged with its internal argument, l-tilaawat-a ‘the recitation’ to form the VP, samiʕ-tu l-tilaawat-a ‘listened to the recitation’, the manner adverbial, jayyid-an ‘perfectly’ adjoins the VP to form another VP, samiʕ-tu l-tilaawat-a jayyid-an ‘listened to the recitation perfectly’. It is in this position that the adverbial jayyid-an receives its accusative case licensed by FEO as defended in Ernst (2002, 36–8). The resulting VP is then merged with the light abstract v, which has to do reading. This light abstract verb has a strong V-feature, triggering the lexical verb samiʕ-tu ‘listened’ to move via head-to-head movement to form the v-bar, samiʕ-tu + do l-tilaawat-a samiʕ-tu jayyid-an ‘did listen to the recitation perfectly’. The resulting v-bar is then merged with the external argument, the DP ana ‘I’, which is assigned an agent theta role by the verb to form the complex vP shell, samiʕ-tu l-tilaawat-a jayyid-an ‘I listened to the recitation perfectly’. At this point, the tree in (40) correctly predicted the order of (35), samiʕ-tu l-tilaawat-a jayyid-an and distinguished between the merger and adjunction,^[8] in the sense that a merger expands different syntactic objects into a larger projection, (e.g. the merge of _V samiʕ-tu ‘listened’ with _DP l-tilaawat-a ‘the recitation’ to the VP), while an adjunction, by contrast, expands the same syntactic object into a larger projection (e.g. the adjunction of _Adv jayyid-an ‘perfectly’ to _VP samiʕ-tu l-tilaawat-a ‘listened to the recitation’ yields another VP).

In contrast to Stepanov (2001) and Lebeaux (1988, 1991, and 2000), where the adjunction is assumed to be merged late (post-cyclically), this study claimed the standard assumption of a Bare Phrase Structure within the minimalist program (Chomsky 1995), and argues that an adjunction is a cyclic merger and that the adjunction of the adverbial jayyid-an ‘perfectly’ to the VP does not change the selective or interpretive properties of the VP, which is interpreted as being set-merged.

A similar account is generalised to circumstantial adverbials in Arabic. Circumstantial adverbs in Arabic refer to structures that express a certain range of circumstances under which an event takes place (Ryding 2005). Circumstantial adverbs appear in a similar position as manner adverbials. However, they are distinguishable from normal adverbials in that their order is fixed at the end of the sentence, and they typically are PPs or NPs except manner circumstantial adverbials. Moreover, they do not show a flexible order and cannot skip over the object to the positions available for other adverbials. This fact supports our hypothesis that lower adverbials are attached to the lower phase of the clause. Semantically, this subclass is different from adverbials in that they modify the predicate of an underlying event, but not the operators (Fehri 1998, Abu-Chacra 2007), as shown in the following:

As noted in (42) and (43), the adjunction site of circumstantial adverbs in Arabic is fixed and designated at the rightmost edge of the vP phase. However, PP circumstantial adverbs can appear in sentence-initial position as focused elements, not as adverbials as noted in (42c). Thus, circumstantial adverbials constitute a substantial class of their own in this respect, in that they do not characterise heterogeneous order.

Subject-oriented adverbials are another class of lower adverbials. In some languages this class has a unifying morphological characteristic, making them a distinguished class from others. For instance, Jackendoff (1972), Ernst (2002), Matsuoka (2013), Morzycki (2016) among others noted that nearly all adverbs in English end with -ly and take an event and a participant in the event as their complements. However, in Arabic, there is no unifying morphological characteristic for all classes of adverbials. Subject-oriented adverbials in Arabic occur between the subject and the main verb, as in (44) or between the subject and its adjective complement as in (45). The following structure in (46) is proposed to account for such type of adverbial.

The derivation proceeds in the following fashion. First, the verb, yaʔtii ‘come’ is merged with the adverbial, mutaʔakhkhiran ‘late’ to form the VP, yaʔtii mutaʔakhiran ‘comes late’. The resulting VP is then merged with the light abstract verb v, which has strong V-features that affect the verb to move from the head of the inner VP shell to adjoin it to form v-bar, yaʔtii + do mutaʔakhkhiran ‘does comes late’. Second, the adverbial, ʕumuum-an ‘generally’ is then adjoined to the resulting v’ to form another v’, ʕumuum-an yaʔtii mutaʔakhkhiran ‘generally comes late’. This v’ is then merged with the DP subject, al-rajulu ‘the man’ to form the complex vP shell, al-rajul-u ʕumuum-an yaʔtii mutaʔakhkhiran ‘the man generally comes late’.

Another characteristic of the lower adverbials is that they cannot precede negation or skip over TP to adjoin positions that are higher than the vP layer or sentence-initial, as shown in the following (48)–(51).

In contrast, subject-modifying adverbs in languages such as English and perhaps in many other Indo-European languages can precede negation, as in (52). These subject-oriented adverbs may follow negation in marked contexts, which are generally assumed to have different scopes and readings.

Following that, it is reasonable to assume that the semantic scope and the modification domain partially regulate the distribution of adverbs and adverbials at least in Arabic and that the lower adverbials are vP layer adjuncts. It is also well-documented that adverbs such as quickly, slowly, sadly, frequently, often, and soon in English can appear in initial, final, or preverbal positions (Jackendoff 1972, Ernst 2014, Payne 2018), but Arabic does not allow such variations, despite spoken dialects allow it (cf. Ghamdi Arabic). Lower adverbials cannot skip to higher positions above the vP layer as the following (53), which along with the discussion provided above, supports the assumption that lower adverbials are vP adjuncts.

The notion of phase-based analysis of adverbs is also proposed by Mizuno (2010) to account for speech-act adverbs and epistemic adverbs in English. Mizuno (2010) argued that these two classes of adverbs are locally commanded by their licensers within phases. Mizuno’s (2010) proposal is based on locality principals, but our proposal is based on the semantic scope and the modification domain of adverbials.

Temporal or time point adverbials such as al-ʔaana ‘now’ al-yauma ‘today’, ʔams ‘yesterday’ are sentence-final adverbials in Arabic; however, temporal can appear in the left periphery in the focus constructions, such as follows.

The two instances of al-ʔaana ‘now’ have different readings. In (54a), al-ʔaana refers to the starting time point, in that the sentence can have an English translation as ‘the launching time starts from now’, while in (54b) it refers to a particular time point, equivalent to ‘at this time, the launching took place’. This is commonly related to the focus position of the adverb, which means NOW not BEFORE. Interestingly, lower adverbials follow a fixed hierarchical restriction. Subject-modifying adverbials precede verb-modifying adverbials which precede manner adverbials, in the manner given in (55) and exemplified in (56a).

The sentence in (56) contains three adverbials: ħaqiiqat-an ‘indeed’, tamaam-an ‘completely’, and jayyidan ‘perfectly’. The adverbial, haqiiqat-an ‘indeed’ is hierarchically higher than tamaam-an ‘completely’ and jayyid-an ‘perfectly’ and not the opposite, as the ill-formed sentence in (56b) shows. However, such hierarchical restrictions within the lower adverbials are only applicable in multiple adverbials sentences. As for the sentences with one adverbial, this adverbial can appear in multiple positions within the lower zone as noted in (39). Such hierarchical constraints suggest that lower adverbials in Arabic follow a certain hierarchy, as defended by Jackendoff (1972), Ernst (2014), and Fehri (1998). Fehri (p. 17) suggested the following hierarchy for lower adverbials.

Although the modification of (56) shows these adverbials are categorised as lower adverbials, the question arises as to how the derivation proceeds. In other words, which adjunct merges first, and why? Assuming that the structure was built from the bottom upwards, the adjunction of jayyidan ‘perfect’ was before the adjunction of ħaqiiqatan ‘indeed’ and the optional adverbial tamaaman ‘completely’ because the latter preceded the former linearly. Therefore, the linear order of adverbials in Arabic may indicate their semantic scope. Lower adverbials of all classes cannot skip over the verb phrase layer to higher positions.

The linear order in (56) will have the structure as in (58) (we will not show the adjunction of tamaaman ‘completely’ because it is optional) where both the emphatic adverbial, ħaqiiqatan ‘indeed’ and the manner adverbial, jayyidan ‘perfectly’ are structurally attached to the VP shell, although the former precedes the latter. The adverbial, jayyidan ‘perfectly’ adjoins the rightmost edge of the VP, and ħaqiiqatan ‘indeed’ precedes the object, kulla šayʔ-in ‘everything’. The adjunction of jayyidan ‘perfectly’ and ħaqiiqatan ‘indeed’ conserves intact the labelling and headedness information of the derivation, thereby supporting the assumption that they are vP layer adjuncts.

In this subsection, it was argued that lower adverbials are vP adjuncts. This assumption was discussed and exemplified along with their cartographic structure. The attachment points of lower adverbials are flexible (either pre- or post-verbal) within the vP phase. The next subsection discusses the higher adverbials.

6.4 Higher adverbials

The higher adverbials have a wider semantic scope and modification domain, and they are CP-related adverbials that modify the whole propositions or eventualities. This group of adverbials in Arabic includes discourse-oriented adverbials such as saraaħatan ‘frankly’, evaluative adverbials such as Tabʕ-an ‘evidently’, and epistemic adverbials such as rubbamaa ‘perhaps’. This class of adverbials describes speaker’s attitude towards the proposition (Ernst 2014, Carnie et al. 2014), and therefore, they are sometimes known as speaker-oriented or speech act or pragmatic adverbials. Examples of higher adverbials which include discourse-oriented, evaluative, and epistemic adverbials are given in (60).

These proposition-modifying adverbials commonly appear in the clause-initial position above those zones or fields identified for lower adverbials. Occasionally they may appear in the other normal positions for sentential adverbs, following or preceding the finite auxiliary as in the following example:

Traditionally, discourse-oriented adverbs are defined as functional lexemes that modify the content of a sentence (Ramat and Ricca 1998). Their classification into evaluative, modal, subject-disjuncts, and speech act adverbials is based on their modification status, i.e. whether they modify an event, proposition, or speech act (Swan 1988). The adverbials saraaħatan ‘frankly’ in (61), Tabʕan ‘evidently’ in (62), and rubbamaa ‘perhaps’ in (63) occur in a clause-initial position with pragmatic, evidential, and modal readings, respectively. These semantic interpretations, along with the modification domain they take, enable us to assume that these discourse-oriented adverbials are CP layer adjuncts, and thus, acquire the following structure, as in (64). Following Rizzi (1997), CP can further split into Force, Topic, Focus, and Finite in the manner shown in (65).

However, their adjunction is not always to the leftmost edge of the clause; they may attach to different zones within the CP layer or any zones above the vP layer, such as negation, auxiliaries, modals, TP, etc. In the following (66) and (67), for example, the adverbial qablu ‘before’ baʕdu ‘after’, respectively, appear above the perfective particle qad ^[9] ‘had’ and below the negation lam ‘not’, but still are located within the higher layer, because their attachment is above vP layer. Contrast the following examples.

It is natural to conclude that adverbials such as qablu ‘before’ in (66) and baʕdu ‘yet’ in (67) are higher adverbials, and they cannot precede the perfective particle, qad ‘has’ or skip over the negation, as in (68) and (69). This assumption is shown in the cartographic structure in (70).

Interestingly, more than one higher adverbial can co-occur adjacently or non-adjacently in one sentence, as noted in (71). However, their order in terms of their hierarchy is constrained. Thus, higher adverbials in Arabic tend to follow the hierarchy given in (73).

The domain/frame adverbial, siyaasiyyan ‘politically’ tends to be higher than modal adverbial rubbamaa ‘maybe’, although they together constitute a single class of higher adverbials, as in (74).

Previous studies encountered theoretical problems in accounting for such a rigid distribution, as the one noted in (71). In cartographic theories (see, for example, Cinque (1999)), adverbials of all types have a fixed universal hierarchy as they are base-generated as specifiers of functional heads with a single position. In those instances where the same adverbial can appear in two different phases, such as ɣaaliban ‘often’ in (75) and (76), while these theories suggest the movement of heads around the adverbs or multiple positions of the same adverb, this study argued that its position is determined by the semantic scope and modification domain the adverbial.

The adverbial ɣaaliban ‘often’ appears in different positions and, eventually, with different meanings. In (75), ɣaaliban ‘often’ together with –maa ‘that’ is a discourse-oriented modifier, modifying the overall proposition, thus attached to a clause-initial position; the CP layer. While the indefinite form of ɣaaliban in (76), has a subject-oriented interpretation and modifies the vP phase. In this particular regard, it is reasonable to assume the –maa ‘that’ in Arabic functions as a focused morpheme when attached to some degree adverbials. Therefore, it is natural to conclude that the semantic scope and the modification domain of the adverbials in Arabic partially regulate their distribution.