ABSTRACT
The author presents the book’s main objectives: discussing previous analyses of adjuncts which need specific devices to capture the distinctive properties of adjuncts and suggesting a new account which accords with the Strong Minimalist Thesis (SMT). The title of the book Casting a Minimalist Eye on Adjuncts forms the methodological strategy. The debate on adjuncts dates back to the Government & Binding era and crucially, it is not settled in minimalist times. Scientific demands require keeping syntactic computation as minimal as possible. In the ideal case, a Merge-based syntax should neither resort to projection or labeling, nor to extra operations such as Pair-Merge. If Simplest Merge, conceived of as simple set formation is the only syntactic operation of UG, the phenomenon of adjuncts should follow under this conception too. The author considers the challenge adjuncts pose for a minimalist setting that is not based on a crash-proof but a free syntax.
