A special feature of adverbials, compared to other clause elements in English, is that they do not have a fixed position in the clause, but can occur at the beginning, middle or end. The various positions available to adverbials are surveyed in section 3.1. Other features of the syntax of adverbials are also discussed here, such as obligatoriness and scope. While the former is tied to verb valency and is thus purely syntactic, the latter is partly syntactic and partly semantic. Adverbials are the only type of element that can occur in sequences within the same clause. The distribution and the order of adverbials in sequences are discussed briefly here and more thoroughly in chapters 4–8. Finally, some discourse features that are believed to have a bearing on adverbial placement are reviewed at the end of the chapter.

Adverbial positions

The clause

Adverbial positions are most commonly described in relation to other clause elements. This implies that adverbial placement must be studied in the context of a clause. It is common to regard the clause as a structure with the verb as the nucleus (e.g. Quirk et al. (1985: 50) even if the verb may be ellipted in the case of verbless clauses. The (potential) presence of other clause elements is dependent on the transitivity or valency of the verb.