Verb Adverb Modification: Why “lightly” isn’t “playfully”, yet “playfully” can be “lightly”

Verb-Adverb Modification: Why lightly isn’t playfully, yet playfully can be lightlyModification is not always a transparent addition of the property expressed by the modifier. For instance, in (1), one would assume that Nancy hit Oliver with little force. This is confirmed by (2): The sentence sounds odd if we contrast playfully with lightly, suggesting that these adverbs’ meaning contributions are similar. Yet the “force reduction” reading of (1) is not due to the lexical semantics of the adverb playfully, as this reading can be cancelled, cf. in combination with hard in (2).
(1)Nancy hit Oliver playfully on the arm.
(2)Nancy hit Oliver playfully, but still rather ?lightly/ok hard, on the arm.
Crucially, this is not an individual occurrence, but a systematic pattern, cross-cutting traditional distinctions between e.g. manner adverbs, mental-attitude adverbs, resultatives and subject depictives. Adverbs such as playfully productively result in an inference on the verb’s force scale (decrease or increase, e.g. angrily). A preliminary questionnaire study shows that speakers can readily compute and cancel this force inference.I propose to model this pattern within Frame Semantics, as developed by a.o. Gamerschlag et. al. (2013). Based on a type hierarchy to model world-knowledge, as proposed by Petersen & Gamerschlag (2013), admissible inferences can be computed. In (1) above, an implicit value in the type hierarchy, imp[hit,FORCE,playfully], will be connected to the value ‘lightly’ of the attribute FORCE. To make the connection explicit, MANNER --> FORCE will then be defined as an inference between attributes of the type ‘hitting event’.Frame Semantics thus allows formalizing pragmatic knowledge in modification.ReferencesGamerschlag, Thomas, Doris Gerland, Rainer Osswald, and Wiebke Petersen, ed. 2013. Frames and concept types: Applications in language and philosophy, volume 94 of Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy. Springer.Petersen, Wiebke, and Thomas Gamerschlag. 2013. Why chocolate eggs can taste old but not oval: A frame-theoretic analysis of inferential evidentials. In Frames and concept types: Application in language and philosophy, ed. Thomas Gamerschlag, Doris Gerland, Rainer Osswald, and Wiebke Petersen, volume 94 of Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, chapter 9, 199-218, Springer.