Adverb orientation: semantics and pragmatics

Abstract

Orientation is a well known property of some adverbs in English. Early approaches to the topic simply offered a systematisation of paraphrase relations between these adverbs and the corresponding adjectives. Current cognitive (Nakamura, 1997) and Event Logic (García Núñez, 1999) approaches have discovered simpler semantic components in adverb orientation. This study presents cases of Subject Oriented Adverbs pragmatically oriented to non explicit participants, and demonstrates that the proposed analyses in terms of simpler meaning components provide a good basis for a predictive and explanatory account of adverb orientation to both explicit and implicit participants.