Oriented Adverbs : Issues in the Lexical Semantics of Event Adverbs

In event semantics, manner adverbs are analysed as 'predicates of events'. However, many such event predicates have variants that apply to individuals instead of events; e.g. : 'to answer the question stupidly' vs. 'a stupid person'. The thesis investigates the question of how these pervasive and systematic alternations can be explained, and in doing so aims at supplementing the neo-Davidsonian theory of adverbial modification with a lexical-semantic account of the modifiers. One and the same underlying adjective usually gives rise to a whole range of different adverbial uses. The exact range of variants is found to be conditioned by the lexical-semantic class of the adjective. Hence, a second topic dealt with in detail is the identification and semantic analysis of a number of 'borderline' adverb types which are different from manner adverbs but still raise the question of whether they might be event-related. After an introduction that motivates the general approach, chapter 2 discusses various theoretical issues concerning the lexical status of adverbs. Chapter 3 introduces the class of resultative adverbs and argues that they constitute a kind of event-related modifier that arises via lexical shift from a predicate of individuals. Chapter 4 discusses individual-level adjectives like 'stupid' and their adverbial uses, namely manner and agentive (or subject-oriented) adverbs. A major finding is that the manner variant is lexically derived from the agentive one. Chapter 5 investigates adjectives of psychological states like 'sad' and their adverbial uses: manner and transparent adverbs. It is shown that, lexically, transparent adverbs are predicates of individuals that are related to events only in the course of composition, thus exhibiting close similarities to depictives. Finally, chapter 6 summarises the findings.In event semantics, manner adverbs are analysed as 'predicates of events'. However, many such event predicates have variants that apply to individuals instead of events; e.g. : 'to answer the question stupidly' vs. 'a stupid person'. The thesis investigates the question of how these pervasive and systematic alternations can be explained, and in doing so aims at supplementing the neo-Davidsonian theory of adverbial modification with a lexical-semantic account of the modifiers. One and the same underlying adjective usually gives rise to a whole range of different adverbial uses. The exact range of variants is found to be conditioned by the lexical-semantic class of the adjective. Hence, a second topic dealt with in detail is the identification and semantic analysis of a number of 'borderline' adverb types which are different from manner adverbs but still raise the question of whether they might be event-related. After an introduction that motivates the general approach, chapter 2 discusses various theoretical issues concerning the lexical status of adverbs. Chapter 3 introduces the class of resultative adverbs and argues that they constitute a kind of event-related modifier that arises via lexical shift from a predicate of individuals. Chapter 4 discusses individual-level adjectives like 'stupid' and their adverbial uses, namely manner and agentive (or subject-oriented) adverbs. A major finding is that the manner variant is lexically derived from the agentive one. Chapter 5 investigates adjectives of psychological states like 'sad' and their adverbial uses: manner and transparent adverbs. It is shown that, lexically, transparent adverbs are predicates of individuals that are related to events only in the course of composition, thus exhibiting close similarities to depictives. Finally, chapter 6 summarises the findings

Meaning and Grammar of Nouns and Verbs

The papers collected in this book cover contemporary and original research on semantic and grammatical issues of nouns and noun phrases, verbs and sentences, and aspects of the combination of nouns and verbs, in a great variety of languages. A special focus is put on noun types, tense and aspect semantics, granularity of verb meaning, and subcompositionality. The investigated languages and language groups include Austronesian, East Asian, Slavic, German, English, Hungarian and Lakhota. The collection provided in this book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students specialising in the fields of semantics, morphology, syntax, typology, and cognitive sciences

Manner modification of states

In a recent contribution to a long-standing discussion in semantics as to whether the neo-Davidsonian analysis should be extended to stative predicates or not, Maienborn (2004, 2005) proposes to distinguish two types of statives; one of them is said to have a referential argument of the Davidsonian type, the other not. As one of her arguments for making such a distinction, Maienborn observes that manner modification seems to be supported only by certain statives but to be excluded by others (thus linking the issue to the use of manner modification as one major argument in favour of event semantics, cf. Parsons 1990). In this paper, it is argued that the absence of manner modification with Maienborn's second group of statives is actually due to a failure of conceptual construal: modification of a predicate is ruled out whenever its internal conceptual structure is too poor to provide a construal for the modifier; hence, the effects observed by Maienborn reduce to the fact that eventive predicates have a more complex conceptual substructure than stative ones. Hence, the issue of manner modification with statives is shown to be orthogonal to questions of logical form and event semantics. The explanatory power of the conceptual approach is demonstrated with a case study on predicates of light emission, adapting the representation format of Barsalou's (1992) frame model

Manner and causation in movement verbs

This paper investigates the semantic underpinnings of the distinction between two syntactic types of "manner of movement" verbs in Levin (1993), namely the RUN and ROLL classes. According to Levin's (1993) and Levin & Rappaport's (1995) work on unaccusativity, a semantic factor of "internal causation" should be the trigger for the classification of a movement verb as intransitive (=not-unaccusative), and hence for its belonging to the RUN class. We point out empirical problems for this characterisation, mainly coming from the different readings of the German verb fliegen (fly). From a comparison with other semantically similar verbs, we conclude that the semantic description which underlies the class distinction should be refined: instead of "internal causation", the crucial semantic factor is described here as "inherent specification for a momentum of movement". This result indicates that forces, and relations between forces, have to be part of the semantic description of the manner component in movement verbs

Spatial Semantic Features: ‘Convergent ’ vs. ‘Divergent ’ Verbs

In this study, we investigate two classes of spatial semantic features for verbs, using a priming paradigm. The verb classification is based on a distinction between the movement directions ‘convergent ’ (reducing the distance) and ‘divergent ’ (enlarging the distance between two objects). These directionality features were also applied to abstract conceptual domains like social contact or functional relation. The results confirm the concrete / abstract distinction for verbs and show that ‘convergent’ and ‘divergent ’ are able to produce priming effects within, and possibly across, conceptual domains. Convergent and divergent did not behave symmetrically leading us to the conclusion that they may be two different features rather than values of a ‘direction ’ feature

Towards verb modification in frames : A case study on German “schlagen” (to hit)

Hit-verbs have three basic meaning components, namely movement, contact and force (e.g. [12], Levin 1993), which interact with the verbs’ argument structure in various ways. In this paper, we map out the different grammatical constructions of the German verb schlagen (usually, though loosely, translated as ‘hit’; also ‘beat’, ‘strike’) and their restrictions on agentivity and the force component. Using modification by pure manner adverbs as a tool to test for possible default values of the force component, and agent-oriented adverbs to discover possible interactions with agentivity, we show that German schlagen is rather liberal with respect to its force component. Crucially, the force component may not only be modified by standard, force-denoting manner adverbs such as lightly and hard, but also through agent-oriented adverbs such as playfully, via a defeasible inference. We show further that our findings can be profitably modelled in Frame Semantics, a framework which is especially well suited for modelling a fine-grained decomposition of word meaning, including the manner-related components of verbs