Fast 'almost' and the visibility parameter for functional adverbs

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Abstract
Since the years of generative semantics, it has been claimed that the adverbs again and almost have access to different parts of verbal meanings. These adverbs — which we call D(ecomposition)-adverbs — are therefore classical witnesses for any decompositional approach to lexical structures. Stechow (1995, 1996) has shown that positional facts observed with German wieder ‘again’ can be explained by the assumption that words are partially formed in the syntax. The wieder -data give evidence for a syntactic decomposition of verbs into VOICE + BECOME + RESULT STATE. In this paper we investigate the behaviour of German fast ‘almost’. We show that fast can intervene between VOICE and VP, but that it does not have access to the result state of telic verbs. In other words, fast cannot have narrow scope with respect to BECOME in a decomposition structure. To account for this difference between wieder and fast , we assume a Visibility Parameter classifying D-adverbs; only wieder but not fast has the capacity of seeing the result XP of a decomposition. However, there seems to be cross-linguistic and inner linguistic variation with respect to the Visibility Parameter. According to the literature, English almost is able to modify the result state of a telic verb. Furthermore, the configuration BECOME + fast + Result XP in German seems to be accepted by a number of speakers as well. We conclude that the Visibility Parameter is a lexical property of D-adverbs which varies across languages and dialects.

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