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

Verb-Adverb Modification in Frame Semantics: Why lightly isn’t playfully, yet playfully can be lightly Much work has been done in semantics to account for verb-adverb modification, especially in the framework of Event Semantics (e.g. Parsons, 1990; Eckardt, 1998; Piñón, 2007). Yet modification is not always a transparent addition of the property expressed by the modifier to an event. 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). Similarly, for angrily in (3), a “force increase” inference arises (cf. incompatibility with hard), which can again be cancelled. (1) Nancy hit Oliver playfully on the arm. (2) Nancy hit Oliver playfully, but still rather ?lightly/ok hard, on the arm. (3) Nancy hit Oliver angrily, but still rather ?hard/ok lightly, 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 or angrily, when combined with hit-verbs, can productively pick out the verb’s force dimension for modification, decreasing or increasing its value. A questionnaire study shows that speakers can readily compute and cancel this force inference. Further evidence for this is expected from a self-paced reading experiment, with sentences containing either a control adverb (e.g. lightly) or a target adverb (e.g. playfully), cf. (4). Longer reading times are expected for the target, due to the necessity to cancel the force-inference. The direct contradiction in the control should be read comparatively fast. (4) Nancy hit Oliver lightly/playfully, but still rather hard, on the arm. This pattern cannot be modelled in a straight-forward manner within the framework of Event Semantics. Pinòn (2007) provides some examples of conceptual axioms that determine which of a verb's dimensions can be modified by an adverb. Yet this doesn't follow naturally from the framework, as Event Semantics treats verbs and modifiers as sets of events and does not address conceptual dimensions. To explain the nature of these inferences, a conceptually-oriented framework is called for. I propose to model this pattern within Frame Semantics, as proposed by Barsalou (1992) and further developed by a.o. Gamerschlag et. al. (2013). Frames are recursive attribute-value structures used to model conceptual structure. Based on a type hierarchy to model world-knowledge (cf. Petersen & Gamerschlag, 2013), admissible inferences in the frame structure 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. MANNER --> FORCE will then be defined as an inference in the type hierarchy between attributes of the type ‘hitting event’. A Frame-based model of verb-adverb modification can thus explain conceptual inferences such as above based on a fine-grained type hierarchy over which inferences can be represented. References Barsalou, Lawrence. 1992. Frames, concepts and conceptual fields. In Frames, Fields and Contrasts: New Essays in Semantic and Lexical Organisation, ed. Adrienne Lehrer and Eva Feder Kittay, 21-74, Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum. Eckardt, Regine. 1998. Adverbs, Events, and Other Things. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Gamerschlag, 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. Parsons, Terence. Events in the Semantics of English. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 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. Piñón, Christopher. 2007. Manner adverbs and manners. Handout at the 7. Ereignissemantik-Konferenz, Schloss Hohentübingen.