Tread lightly

Abstract 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 <op deze manier/*te voet>. …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.