Hitting playfully and kissing angrily: A self-paced reading study on force inferences

Hitting playfully and kissing angrily: A self-paced reading study on force inferences Despite previous work on verb-adverb modification (e.g. Parsons, 1990; Eckardt, 1998; Piñón, 2007, Schäfer, 2013), not all meaning aspects arising in this process are accounted for. One such understudied aspect is a type of force inference. (1) implies Nancy hitting Oliver with little force, as confirmed by (2): playfully and lightly cannot be contrasted, i.e. have similar meanings. (1) Nancy hit Oliver playfully on the arm. (2) Nancy hit Oliver playfully, but still rather ?lightly/ok hard, on the arm. Yet this “force decrease” reading of (1) can be cancelled, cf. the compatibility with hard in (2).This systematic pattern cross-cuts traditional distinctions between several types of adverbs, productively resulting in an inference on the verb’s force scale (decrease or increase, e.g. angrily). We tested these inferences in a self-paced-reading experiment. Participants read each sentence word by word, and rated it on a 4-point Likert scale. Results show significant reading time delays (p<0.05) on the critical adverb and the spill-over area. These results show the crucial role of world-knowledge in meaning composition. Eckardt, Regine. 1998. Adverbs, Events, and Other Things. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Parsons, Terence. 1990. Events in the Semantics of English. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Piñón, Christopher. 2007. Manner adverbs and manners. Handout at the 7. Ereignissemantik Konferenz, Schlosss Hohentübingen. Schäfer, Martin. 2013. Positions and Interpretations: German Adverbial Adjectives at the Syntax-Semantics Interface. Berlin: De Gruyter.