Abstract
It is widely observed in familiar languages like English and also reported in some Austronesian languages like Tagalog and Malagasy that adverbial modifiers surface as adverbs / adjuncts and can move around but cannot take complements. However, it is demonstrated in this chapter that adverbial modifiers in Kavalan usually occur as matrix verbs, taking the lexical verbs as their complements. Displaying serial verb construction (SVC), adverbial expressions and their lexical verbs are juxtaposed with no intervening conjunctions in Kavalan. It is also shown that adverbial expressions can take as their subjects nonsubcategorized noun phrases, which I argue to be jointly licensed by complex predicates composed of adverbial expressions and their lexical verbs. These findings prompt reflections on Cinque's (1999) theory of adverbs, Tsai and Chang's (2003) Neo-Davidsonian syntax hypothesis, and Croft's (1991, 2001) prototype and markedness theory of syntactic categories.