Adjuncts Of Place Essay

6.2. ADJUNCTS OF PLACE

The second class of adjuncts related to semantics is adjuncts of place or location. This particular kind of adjuncts reveals the location where an action takes place. They indicate the exact place where a person or an object is, the source location they are coming from and the goal location they are going to, and also the direction and path they are heading to. Normally prepositional phrases are related to adjuncts of place, as well as noun phrases. The basic prepositions utilised with adjuncts of place are: in, from, to, on or at. For more instances of prepositions indicating position and direction consult English Grammar by Collins Cobuild, pp. 298-300. Adjuncts indicating place can be subdivided in change of location adjuncts. This category includes source, path, direction and goal.

As has been pointed out in the previous paragraph, the normal execution of

A sample of location of place is the underlined PP in: Tom saw his nephew in Budapest. The adjunct in Budapest expresses what was the exact position of a place. Then, the PP at the door in: Tom saw his nephew at the door, describes the place where Tom was when he saw his nephew. But the sentence: Tom saw his nephew on the bus is ambiguous, since it could be construed either, as if it were referring to the place where Tom was when he saw his nephew, or if it were the place in which his nephew was when he saw him. Furthermore, some location adjuncts have the possibility to be understood as temporal location prepositional phrases contingent on the context of the rest of the sentence. They reveal the duration or the period of an action like in: he was sick in Senegal. At first, this prepositional phrase denotes location, but it would also possess some temporal connotations if it is seen as a period of time when ‘he’ was in