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).
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Notes
- 1.
The possibility for a verb to be simultaneously an achievement and a causative largely depends on the way these classes are defined in details. For those like van Voorst 1992 who define achievements as denoting punctual events, ‘their status as achievements rules out their being causative’ (p.84). For those like Kearns 2003 who admit that achievement verbs have a non-punctual reading, achievement verbs can be causatives. I will adopt the second view here, cf. Sect. 4.3.
- 2.
The reader will easily find other examples of oepvs which pass some tests of agentivity but not others in the language of her choice (see Martin 2006 for more systematic examples of these kinds of discrepancies for French). Actually, heterogeneity in the results of agentivity tests is not surprising, given that some of these tests do not seem to diagnose agentivity at all. For instance, imperatives are compatible with predicates who denote states whose occurrence cannot be controlled by the Addressee (Be spontaneous! is a grammatical sentence, even if spontaneity is an uncontrollable state, as Stendhal 1890/1996 or Elster 1983 have noted). Cf. Martin (2008a) on imperative sentences with weakly agentive predicates.
- 3.
Note that at least in some of the examples of (7), patiently (or its French and German equivalent) has its manner reading, despite the pre-verbal position.
- 4.
- 5.
In the line of Schfer 2002, Rawlins this volume makes a similar proposal for adverbs of space and time like slowly, that he takes to be predicates of events (and therefore pure manner adverbs) in all their uses, included in high-attached positions.
- 6.
According to Piñón 2009’s analysis, under the agentive reading, the adverb predicates the event of deciding to answer. If we combine this idea to Ernst’s hypothesis, we would therefore assume that under the agentive reading, cleverness has to manifest itself in the decision to answer.
- 7.
Geuder itself does not draw this conclusion. His only concludes that adverbs like intelligently have an ‘opaque’ relationship to predicates of individuals. He contrasts these ‘opaque’ adverbs to ‘transparent’ adverbs, which will be presented in the next section. As already mentioned in the introduction, ‘transparent’ adverbs are transparent wrt their adjectival base in the sense that they must be understood as saying something about the state of the Agent.
- 8.
Note that the alternative agentive reading of the adverbs is excluded given the context and the post-verbal position. So the manner reading is selected in (20).
- 9.
Among ‘transparent’ dispositional adjectives, some like adroit or habile can however predicate a noun which does not refer to an Experiencer (cf. un plat adroit ‘a skilful meal’).
- 10.
Ernst seems to admit that some dispositional adverbs like patiently are mental-attitude adverbs, probably because they entail an agent state as we saw above. For us, patiently is simply a transparent dispositional adverb. In the presentation, I will call Ernst’s mental-attitude adverbs psychological adverbs, and ignore the few dispositional adverbs that he considers to be mental attitude adverbs until Sect. 4.2.2.2.
- 11.
One immediately sees that on this respect, patiently does not conform with sadly and calmly, since patient cannot be used as a depictive.
- 12.
This makes the intentional reading of psychological adverbs very similar to the agentive reading of dispositional adverbs proposed by Piñón (2009).
- 13.
This is not the case for the transparent dispositional adverbs listed in (26b). Section 4.2.3 shows that transparent adverbs (26b) do not display the ambiguity illustrated in (31) and (32), contrary to what Ernst claims (since he classifies adverbs like patiently among the mental-attitude adverbs, which are supposed to display the manner/state ambiguity).
- 14.
- 15.
The state denoted by adverbs derived from these adjectives takes place during the event and is thus always transitory in a non-generic sentence.
I borrow the term relative from Barker 2002, who introduces it to distinguish two uses of evaluative adjectives like clever or patient. In its relative use, patient describes a state of x relative to an act of x (as in He is patient to/in doing that). In its absolute use, it describes a (permanent) disposition independent of any of its instantiations (as in He’s a patient person).
- 16.
Remember that these adverbs are not considered as transparent by Geuder.
- 17.
Geuder 2000:202–204 has a different view. He considers that on its manner reading, sadly describes an event which makes ‘externally visible’ the state of sadness of the subject’s referent. He thus assumes that these adverbs are ‘transparent’ also on their manner use in that they still denote a mental state. I do not think it is the case of sadly, given the possibility to use them with inanimate subjects (cf. (39a). But I think it is correct for other psychological adverbs like anxiously, cf. below.
- 18.
Interestingly, intelligemment differs from stupidement in this respect in that it does not have the evaluative reading (cf. Stupidement/ # Intelligement, il a plu (‘Stupidly/ Cleverly, it rained’). See e.g. Bellert 1977 and Bonami et al. 2004 on the syntax/semantics of this class. Clearly or (un)fortunately are typical examples of evaluative adverbs.
- 19.
The paraphrase in The way… was Adj. is a safer diagnosis of the manner reading, since it is not possible for the evaluative reading (cf. # The way it rained was stupid), or when possible, it does not express the same meaning as the sentence which contains the adverb.
- 20.
Note that facts are a bit more complicated with the adverb graduellement ‘gradually’. As already observed by Piñón 2000, gradually has a reading under which he does not scope on the event introduced by the verb, but on tense. This is for instance the case below.
-
(50)
Gradually there’s not more work for her. (I married a communist, Philip Roth, cited by Piñón 2000)
In this case, gradually does not assert gradualness of the event described by the verb, but rather of “what leads up to this situation” (Piñón, ibid.). This reading is not available for in several steps, as attested by the difficulty to replace gradually with it in (50). So a verb which is compatible with gradually does not necessarily satisfy gradualness (whereas I claim this is the case with adverbs like in several steps). See also Sect. 7.4.1 of Rawlins this volume about low- and high-attached gradually.
Another important difference between patiently and gradually is that the former does not require a scale: it is compatible with atelic predicates (cf. I’m waiting patiently/# gradually). However, combined with telic predicates, patiently resembles gradually in that the progressive unfolding of the event is automatically conceived as scalar and gradual (cf. e.g. eat an apple patiently).
-
(50)
- 21.
As it stands, my account is unsatisfactory because it predicts that weakly agentive adverbs should be unacceptable with progressivement ‘progressively’, which certainly requires that the event unfolds progressively. This goes against the facts: progressivement does not raise the problem of en plusieurs tapes in (51).
- 22.
No (relevant) occurrences of tu en plusieurs tapes or killed in several steps found on the Internet.
- 23.
- 24.
Almost all French translations of the verbs in (2b) cannot be embedded under faire, except for convaincre.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Rafael Marín and Kyle Rawlins for their extremely helpful reviews. I am also grateful to Florian Schfer 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.
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Martin, F. (2013). Oriented Adverbs and Object Experiencer Psych-Verbs. In: Arsenijević, B., Gehrke, B., Marín, R. (eds) Studies in the Composition and Decomposition of Event Predicates. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 93. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5983-1_4
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