Tread lightly: Deriving distributional differences in Dutch manner adverbials

Different Dutch manner adverbials exhibit different syntactic behaviour in embedded clauses (1); given accounts of the supposed cross-linguistic uniformity of manner adverbials as adpositional phrases, this comes as a surprise.

(1)
…dat Reinder het parcours < op deze manier / te voet> aflegt .
…that R. the course on this manner / on foot traverses


‘…that Reinder is traversing the course in this way/on foot.’
I argue non-uniform distribution of Dutch manner adverbial PPs is related to differences in their internal structure; lightness of the nominal complement embedded in them is shown to affect the structure of PP, which in turn affects how they distribute. With Collins (2007) and Koster (1994), I argue light PPs, as complements of the verb, must move away from sentence-final position, while non-light PPs do so optionally, deriving the observed distributional disparity between MAs.