Adverbs/adverbials have figured prominently in the semantic literature, but until recently they have received relatively little attention in the syntactic literature. The discussion in this chapter takes as its starting point the division between clause adverbials and VP adverbials in Jackendoff (1972); cf. also e.g. Kraak & Klooster (1968: §9), Van den Hoek (1972), and Barbiers (2018). The semantic subdivision of these two main groups described in Section 8.2 more or less follows the divisions found in Quirk et al. (1985/1991) and Huddleston & Pullum (2002). Although we differ from Haeseryn et al. (1997) in that we deny the existence of a separate syntactic category (i.e. word class) of adverbs, this work has provided a solid empirical basis for our discussion of the categorial form of adverbial phrases in Section 8.3. Although the linear order of adverbial phrases has received attention in the generative literature since Van den Hoek (1972) and Koster (1974), this has not led to greater insight into the nature of the constraints that determine this order. The issue was put firmly on the research agenda with the publication of Cinque (1999/2006) and Schweikert (2005), which claimed (for all languages) that adverbials are base-generated in fixed structural positions in the clause: cf. Thráinsson (2007: §2.1.6) for a discussion of the Scandinavian languages that may be very helpful for further investigation of Dutch in this respect. The syntactic approach was soon challenged in Ernst (2002), which claims that the distribution of adverbials is essentially determined by semantic factors. The debate, which is still ongoing, has revived interest in the distributional aspects of adverbials, as can be seen from the articles collected by Artemis Alexiadou in Lingua 114/6 (theme issue: Adverbs across frameworks), which reviews a number of selected approaches to the topic. More general introductions to the literature on adverbs and adverbial phrases can be found in Delfitto (2006) and Maienborn & Schäfer (2011), and Delfitto & Fiorin (2017).

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