End position was defined in section 3.1.2 (as in Quirk et al. 1985: 498) as ‘the position in the clause following all obligatory elements’ or ‘the position of the obligatory adverbial when this follows the other obligatory elements’. It may be noted that an adjunct is considered to be in end position even if it is followed by another (optional) adjunct. Example (1) shows an obligatory adjunct in end position, while example (2) shows a cluster of adjuncts in end position.

1. (1) ‘Bring him out here,’ instructed Miss Pickerstaff. <W2F-012>

2. (2) Eighty volumes of evidence, which include more than 1,000 depositions, have been gathered by the American attorneys ∥ in their law suit against Pan Am. <W2C-001>

Syntactic and semantic properties of adjuncts in end position

The distribution of semantic types

End position is by far the most common position for adjuncts, accounting for 77% of the total number of adjuncts in the core corpus. Their distribution across different semantic types is shown in table 6.1.

The most frequent types of adjunct in end position are space and time. These are about three times as frequent as manner and contingency adjuncts, which are number three and four in order of frequency. With the exception of focus and viewpoint, adjunct types occur in end position in at least 50% of occurrences in the core corpus. In the case of space adjuncts the percentage rises to 92.5.