292 Book reviews

v&, Sentence adverbs in a functional perspective. Amsterdam/Phila- njamins, 1986. 96 pp. $22.00/Dfl. 55,OO.

Reviewed by Federica VENIER*

The book by Eva Koktova under review is a unified tentative analysis of two large categories of adverbs, so far analysed separately: sentence adverbials (from medals, such as ‘obviously’ or ‘certainly’, to evaluatives, such as ‘oddly’ or ‘luckily’, to style disjuncts, such as ‘frankly’) and focussing adverbs (such as ‘only’, ‘also’, ‘at least’).

Koktova rej\ects a traditional type of analysis which sees the main difference between the two groups of adverbs in the two different kinds of paraphrase they allow. This analysis is rejected partly because it does not pay any attention to tht different meaning the sentence has depending on the position and, therefore, on the different scope of the adverbs.

The new proposal put forward by Koktova, who follows the Functional Generative Description (FCD), departs from the idea that sentence adverbials and focussing adverbs have analogous ‘scoping properties’.

The author follows the ideas of the Prague school and in particular those of Sgall and Hajitova.

We are therefore told that “the system of natural language contains.. .

certain pragrlatically based distilzctions, such as.. . the topic-focus articulation [TFA] of a sentence, which is formally accountable for in terms of the left-to- right ordering of the nodes of the underlying dependency tree of a sentence, i.e. as the deep word-order of a sentence, with the boundary between topic and focus”.. Again, “the dbpendency structure of a sentence is assumed to have a recursive character, i.e. complementations can be dependent not only on the verb (as the root of the dependency tree) but also on nouns, adjectives. . . verbs at any depth of the dependency tree” (p. 18).

The contextually ‘non-bound’ pa&t of the sentence will be its focus: There is no distinction between ‘focus’, ‘rheme’ and ‘new information’. But, “con- textual boundness has a recursive character: every subtree of the dependency tree (i.e. every sequence of sister nodes) has its own deep word-order, including contextually bound and non-bound nodes”. Therefore “an embed- ded non-bound node may constitute an embedded focus of a sentence” (Pa 19).

It is the feature of recursivity that makes it possible to understand that sentence adverbials and focussing adverbs can be thought of as having an identical type of complementation in the underlying representation: They are therefore called ‘complementation of attitude expressions’ (‘CA expressions’).

* Correspondence address: F. Venier, Via Monte Ortigara 4, l-24100 Bergamo, Italy.

Book revikws 293

Complementation and focus are coincident and the adverb marks the begin- ning of the focal part of the sentence.

The principle of dividing the sentence into topic and focus and that of the identity CA/focus ace, in Koktov&‘s opinion, generally valid for all languages while the superficial distribution of these expressions varies from one language to another. In particular, Koktova stresses that in English, the main language she deals with, focussing adverbs generally occupy a central position in the sentence, while sentence adverbials very often tend to occupy a “scope ambiguous position” (p. 3), and are therefore located at the beginning of the sentence. To take an example:

(1) Surprisingly, Terry will run from Manhattan to Brooklyn. .

is ambiguous, since it could be derived from any of the following possible underlying structures (p. 3):

h-run Terrv from M. to B.

(lb) Terry / surprisingly will-run from M. to B.

(1 c) Terry will-run / surprisingly from M. to B.

(1 d) Terry from M. will-run / surprisingly to B. .

The verb position in (la-d) is justified by the fact that, for the theq we are dealing with, in the underlying representation “the verb stands close to the topic-focus boundary: either in the topic-final position (. . .) or in the focus- initial position, or (. . .) in the second position in the focus, the focus initial position being occupied by a CA expression” (p. 21).

It is therefore clear thlat sentence (la) is considered by ‘topicless’. This sort of sentence is related to the few types of sentences commonly considered topicless, namely weather-sentences (e.g. ‘it’s raining’) and thetic statements.

Later, attention is paid to secondary cases of the underlying occurrence of CA expressions, in particular to the cases where the adverb does not appear at the beginning of the focus but within the scope of another adverb and to the cases where one adverb exercises its scoping properties in directions other than the linear, from left to right. This is for instance the case of a sentence such as (2)

(2) Terry will run surprisingly probably only to

derived from

(2a) Terry will-run / surprisingly probably only to B. I

1

(P= 29)

294 8ook reviews

or of a ser,tence such as (3 ) that we can find in the following sequence:

(3A) Henry will run to (3B) Terry will run to B. surprisingly probably also

where (3B) is derived from

(3B-a) Terry to will-run / surprisingly probably also (p. 34) +

+ 3

For Eva Koktova, a CA expression is “a mea .i of the speaker’s commen- tary on how the focus of a sentence holds (e.g. it surprisingly holds, it pmbd~ly holds , . ..),, (p. 27). The CA category, in her o$nion, is universal because it is argued that “every natural language exhibits the means of expresGon of how the Focus, or the new information, of a senterise holds” (p. 28).

In the !ast chapter a classification is then drawn up of the diRerent adverbial expressions. Somewhat contradictorily, to this end employs the already well-known distinctions between the various sentence adverbials and focussing adverbs, mainly using those criteria of lexical semantics she had previously rejected. Therefore, sentence adverbials will be different from focussing adverbs because they are “S&W veritate paraphrasable by clauses containing lexicaliy corresponding adjectives or verbs” (p. 59) and they are freely distributed within the sentence. Again, the class of sentence adverbs is further vided on the b sis of the nature of the complement proposition (presuppos or not) and of t this division means (for instance the possibility or the impossibili;y sf omitting the adverb).

From this point of view, Koktova re-exarni ;s a vast range of works on adverbs, always judging them synthetically and precisely. It is obviously the reso ve he examines previous work that allows her to Pay su space, to such a wide range of contributions. Special attention is paid to works. of authors linking the problem of adverbs to that of the topic/focus articulation of the sentence: here I am referring to

rtsch, Lang, Dane5 and HajiEova. The richness of the documentation is SO evident when we look at the bibliography. Koktov6’s analysis is very interesting when seen within its theoretical

framework, because it shows a new application of the topic/focus distinctiun. Nevertheless, I fel uneasy about the validity of the principles governing it. In fact, unifying sentence and focussing adverbs in a single group does not seem to me to be fully justified because identifying scope and focus does not P uce satisfactory results.

observations are based on knowledge of sentence adverbiails and, in particular, on what I have point out in a work on modal adverbs (Venier (198(j)), Sased on sources at least partially different from those of Koktovh.

Book reviews 295

My work started with the proposal of Hare (1970), followed later by Lyons ( 1977), for distinguishing three fundamental components within the sentence, namely the neustic or sign of subscription, the tropic or sign of mood, and the phrastic, corresponding more or less to the propositional content. Considering semantic and syntactic features of medals, I proposed interpreting these adverbs as signs of subscription, i.e., as elements within whose domain the propositional content of the sentence (tropic+ phrastic) falls and used by the speaker to make his degree of certainty explicit.

This proposal was corroborated by a work by Hcbier (1983) I acquainted with at the end of my work (cf. also Stein’s (1986) review of Htibler’s book). In 9 the equation modal adverbs/neustics was proposed from a p than a semantic point of view: While I was concerned with the problem of identifying and proving this equation, H paid more attention to the effmts of modal adverbs working as neustics, I.e., to the perlocutionary aspect of the problem.

Therefore, again in my work, as in those that inspired me, the scope of the adverb was of central importance. But, contrary to what KoktovS does, in the studies mentioned it has always been stated that the scope of the sentence adverbials is the whole sentence and not just a part of it, even where the latter is the rheme.

The different connotations given to the sentence by moving the adverb show that in fact the sentence adverbial has the function OC highlighting the various parts of ths sentence following it in a different way but that it has always the whole secrtence within its scope, unless we create strong intonational pauses between the initial part of the sentence and the part beginning with the adverb.

On the other hand, there is no lack of works on the subject of the position of sentence adverb. Claudia Corum (1975) fqi; instance, speaking of modal adverbs, sees their initial position as evidence of the speaker’s willingness to establish his/her ‘authority’, his/her right to assert what follows; in final position on the contrary she sees a willingness to emphasize what has been said, just in case the assertion by itself has not been effective enough. In sentence central position, the adverb can even have the function of focussing the component close to itself, but in Corum’s paper, the problem of focussing

is decidedly differentiated from the problem of scope. 9 it is only by d ic,$:+? scope from focus and rheme, i.e., not

co adverbs as rh ~‘s, ai-xt we can, in my opinion, COlTtXtly

consider those sentences where: the sx _ence adverb occupies the first position, i.e. those sentences spoken or ;I, ~zrms of ‘topicless sentences’.

Identifying scope and rheme conceals the fact that it is by going more deeply into the relationship between the adverb and its scope that we can find the main differences between the various groups of adverbs. Given in fact the apparently common scope linking sentence adverbials, the various groups

296 Book reviews

(mod&, evaluatives and style disjuncts) are different because of the diserent type of relation they have with their scope.

In other words, all the adverbs we are speaking about have the same scope but it is made up of different entities: i.e., sentence adverbials work on something ‘quantitatively’ identical but ‘qualitatively’ distinguished. Thus, adverbs will work on the utterance of a sentence (style disjuncts, cf. e.g. Conte (1987)) or on a fact, a presupposed proposition whose positive truth value is taken for granted (evaluatives or factive adverbs) or, again, on a proposition whose degree of probability is assigned by the adverb itself (modal adverbs, cf. for instance Schreiber (197 1) an again Conte ( 1987)).

In the same way, focussing adverbials can be distinguished from sentence adverbials because the relation they hold with their scope is different from that of sentence adverbials: Their scope is not only ‘quantitatively’ but also ‘qualitatively’ different from that of the other group.

Bartsch, Renate, 1972. Adverbia!semantik. Frankfurt: Athenium Verlag. Conte, Maria-Elisabeth, 1987. Semiotica dell’enunciazione. Paradigmi 13: 49-63. Corum, Claudia, 1975. A pragmatic analysis of parenthetic adjuncts. Papers from the Eleventh

Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 133-141. Dane& Frantisek, 1973. Vety s restrictivnimi adverbii (ien, pouze, foliko). [Syntences with

restrictiveadverbs (only, merely, solely)]. Slovo a Slovesnost 34: 61-70. HajiCovP, Eva, 1983. Topic and focus. Theoretical Linguistics 10: 268-276. Hare, Richard M., 1970. MI, aning and speech acts. Philosophical Review 79. Now in: R.M. Hare,

197 1. Practical inferences, 74-93. London: Macmillan. Hiibler, Axel, 1983. Understatements and hedges in English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Lang, Ewald, 1979. Zum Status der Satzadverbiale. Slovo a Slovesnost 40: 200-213 Lyons, John, 1977. Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schreiber, Peter A., 1971. Some constraints on the formation of English sentence adverbs.

iry 2: 83- 101. Sgall, P., E. HajiEova, and E. BeneSova, 1973. Topic, focus, and generative semantics Kronberg/

Ts. : Scriptor. Stein, Mark, 1986. Review of Hiibler (1983). Journal of Pragmatics 10: 757-763. Venier, Federica, 1986. Gli avverbi modali. Lingua e Stile 21: 459-483.