Adverbs and functional heads : a cross-linguistic perspective

Cinque presents evidence for locating Adverb Phrases in the specifiers of distinct functional projections, in a more articulated theory of the clause. In this theory, both adverbs and the heads, which encode the functional notions of the clause, are ordered in a rigid sequence. The two sequences appear to match systematically, as would follow if the adverbs were the specifiers of the of the phrases projected by the corresponding heads.