Adverbial phrases differ from arguments in that they are optional in the prototypical case. However, there are cases in which a verb must be accompanied by an adverbial-like phrase. A typical case is the verb wonento live/reside in (228), which must be combined with a locational PP or an AP denoting a characteristic of the accommodation or environment in which the subject of the clause lives.

It is not immediately obvious that the syntactic function of the PPs and APs is really adverbial. They are often called complements because the verb cannot normally occur without them; this assumes that the selection property of the verb is of a syntactic nature. However, this conclusion may be too simple, since the obligatory presence of a PP/AP may also be due to pragmatics: according to Grice’s cooperative principle, the sentence Jan woont can be dismissed as uninformative because the proposition it expresses is usually assumed to be true for all people. The same applies to examples with geboren worden: an example such as Jan is geboren is simply not informative; another similar case is zich gedragento behave, which only occurs without an adverbial phrase in imperatives when the behavior of the addressee is inappropriate: Gedraag je! and actually means “Behave yourself well!”.

Something similar may be true for verbs that select measure phrases like durento last, kostento cost, metento measure and wegenweigh, which were discussed in Section 2.4. Example (230a) shows for duren that these verbs normally need an extra constituent which obviously does not function as an argument; omitting the addition results in an uninformative sentence, since performances always have some duration. That this account may be on the right track is suggested by examples such as (230a): the sentence Het vriestIt freezes is informative in itself and consequently allows the omission of the measure phrase.

We conclude from the above discussion that adverbial phrases are always syntactically optional, but that there may be pragmatic reasons for the obligatory inclusion of an adverbial phrase with certain verbs. For completeness’ sake, we note that Section 3.2.2.4, sub II, provides a somewhat complicated, but in our view conclusive, independent argument for assuming adjunct status for the obligatory locational PPs accompanying the verbs wonento live.