Abstract
‘Non agentive’ object experiencer verbs (e.g. interest) as well as achievement verbs (e.g. find) are traditionally taken to be incompatible with oriented adverbs like cleverly. Research on large corpora disconfirms this claim. This paper accounts for the distribution of these ‘weakly agentive’ verbs with dispositional adverbs (cleverly, patiently) and psychological adverbs (sadly, anxiously), focusing on French data. It provides a new typology of these adverbs and their different readings based on Ernst’s and Geuder’s ones, which accounts for the possibility for such adverbs to have pure manner or result readings. It shows that adverbs of this kind can coerce (i) ‘non-agentive’ object experiencer psych-verbs like interest into causative (and agentive) predicates (He cleverly interested the investors in his product) and (ii) achievements like find into durative (and agentive) verbs (He patiently found the download link).
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Studies in the Composition and Decomposition of Event Predicates |
| Publisher | Springer |
| Pages | 71-97 |
| Number of pages | 27 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 978-94-007-5983-1 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-94-007-5982-4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2013 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Publication series
| Name | Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy |
|---|---|
| Volume | 93 |
| ISSN (Print) | 0924-4662 |
| ISSN (Electronic) | 2215-034X |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2013, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.
Funding
Acknowledgements I would like to thank Rafael Marín and Kyle Rawlins for their extremely helpful reviews. I am also grateful to Florian Schäfer for his valuable comments, as well as to the participants of the Conference Forces in Grammatical Structures (Paris, 2007), the Workshop Polysemy and Conceptual Representation (29th DGFS Meeting, Siegen, 2007) and the research seminar on psych-verbs hold by Artemis Alexiadou (Stuttgart, 2011). I also greatly benefited from discussions of some of this material with Christopher Piñón. I remain of course fully responsible for any errors or omissions. Finally, I wish to thank the editors for inviting me to contribute to this volume. Financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through the Collaborative Research Center 732 ‘Incremental specification in context’, Project B5 ‘Polysemy in a Conceptual System’ is gratefully acknowledged. I would like to thank Rafael Mar?n and Kyle Rawlins for their extremely helpful reviews. I am also grateful to Florian Sch?fer for his valuable comments, as well as to the participants of the Conference Forces in Grammatical Structures (Paris, 2007), the Workshop Polysemy and Conceptual Representation (29th DGFS Meeting, Siegen, 2007) and the research seminar on psych-verbs hold by Artemis Alexiadou (Stuttgart, 2011). I also greatly benefited from discussions of some of this material with Christopher Pi??n. I remain of course fully responsible for any errors or omissions. Finally, I wish to thank the editors for inviting me to contribute to this volume. Financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through the Collaborative Research Center 732 ?Incremental specification in context?, Project B5 ?Polysemy in a Conceptual System? is gratefully acknowledged.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Artemis Alexiadou | |
| the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft |
Keywords
- Agentive Verb
- Manner Adverb
- Manner Reading
- Result Reading
- State Reading