Pernilla Hallonsten Halling

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have proposed a three-way definition of modification, based on the components of discourse, syntax, and semantics. The discourse component builds on the approach of Croft (1991, 2001, 2003), although an expansion of this model is required in order to include adverbial modification (cf. table 3.1). The syntactic component is far from new: the fact that a modified expression has the same syntactic properties as the non-modified expression follows the principle of endocentricity. While it seems to be generally acknowledged that modification is also a semantic phenomenon, the details of what happens semantically when an expression is modified are unclear. The semantic component of the definition in (3.1) states that a modified expression has a meaning that is of the same kind as the meaning of the expression before the modifier was added. This covers complex and less typical instances of modifiers as well, as exemplified in section
3.2. In section 3.3.4, I concluded that manner adverbs cannot be convincingly defined as secondary predicates, since they are already modifiers. The overwhelming cross-linguistic evidence for the affinity of manner adverbs and secondary predicates does not challenge this. Rather, it illustrates that in certain instances, modification and predication are two very closely related domains. This is not a problem, as long as it can be accepted that secondary predicates and manner adverbs can be conceptually as well as empirically related, without classifying manner adverbs as secondary predicates.
While none of the three components of my definition of modification go against the way that this phenomenon is treated in the literature, or state anything not known before, it is the combination of the three that is the important point. This is the purpose of the definition, as illustrated in sections 3.3.1 and 3.4 with various examples where one or two components may be weakened, but at least one component still applies consistently. In conclusion, by bringing different approaches together, modification can be understood as the complex phenomenon that it is.

2.