Revisiting the motivation behind different distributions of argument-oriented adverbials in Chinese and English
Differences on the distribution of argument-oriented adverbials between Chinese and English are not originated from their different space-time view,but from their differences on parts of speech.Since English adverbials can only be fulfilled by adverbs(or adverb-equivalents),the position of argument-oriented adverbials being postverbal or preverbal would not cause syntactic ambiguity.In Chinese,adjectives can also serve as adverbials.This would easily cause syntactic ambiguity when such adverbials appear after the verb in predicate.In order to avoid syntactic ambiguity,Chinese adjectival adverbials can only be preverbal.In addition,the word order of"subject+predicate"is prevalent in Chinese.This leads to a strong predicative nature of postverbal adverbs and postverbal position is not ideal for Chinese adverb adverbials as well.In Chinese,since adverb adverbials can only be preverbal,argument-oriented adverbials(adjectives and adverbs)can only appear before the predicate verbs.
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