Transforming Manner Adverbs into Subject-Oriented Adverbs

Natural Language and Linguistic Theory manuscript No.(will be inserted by the editor)

Transforming Manner Adverbs into Subject-OrientedAdverbs: Evidence from Japanese

Ai Kubota

Received: date / Accepted: date

Abstract It is well known that some adverbs in English, such as stupidly,cleverly and clumsily, can be interpreted as manner adverbs or agent-orientedadverbs depending on their positions in a sentence, e.g., John danced stupidlyvs. Stupidly, John danced. Three approaches are possible and have been pro-posed for this alternation: (i) positing an agent-oriented adverb as the basicentry from which a manner adverb is derived (Ernst 2002), (ii) positing a man-ner adverb as the basic entry from which an agent-oriented adverb is derived(McConnell-Ginet 1982), and (iii) positing two distinct lexical entries for thetwo readings (Pinon 2010). I present data from Japanese which support thesecond approach. However, there would be a problem if we directly adopt thesecond approach for the Japanese data, since the adverbs that at first sightlook like agent-oriented adverbs in Japanese are not truly ‘agent’-oriented,but rather ‘surface-subject’-oriented. I propose an analysis that does not suf-fer from this problem, by modifying an idea from McConnell-Ginet 1982 andalso incorporating the notion of comparison class from Ernst 2002. The dis-cussion extends to another class of adverbs called ‘evaluative adverbs’, suchas fortunately and oddly, which show the same morphological property withsurface-subject oriented adverbs in Japanese.

Keywords Manner adverb · Agent-oriented adverb · Subject-orientedadverb · Evaluative adverb · Japanese · Comparison class · Passive sensitivity

Ai KubotaDepartment of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African LanguagesMichigan State UniversityB-331 Wells HallEast Lansing, MI 48824-1027Tel.: 517-353-0740Fax: 517-432-2736E-mail: [email protected]

2 Ai Kubota

1 Introduction

Jackendoff (1972) notes that “the category ‘adverb’ has traditionally been acatch-all term” (p. 47). That being the case, the classification of adverbs isnot at all a simple task. Furthermore, whether a particular classification orig-inally developed for some language is adequate for other languages as well isanother question. This paper sheds light on one such case, where a certaincategory of adverbs established in one language (English) has a seeminglyequivalent class in another language (Japanese), but where the two categoriesin the two languages turn out to have some different property. More specifi-cally, I focus in this paper on a class of adverbs called agent-oriented adverbsin English, such as stupidly, cleverly and clumsily, and the corresponding ad-verbs in Japanese, such as orokani-mo ‘stupidly’, kashikoku-mo ‘cleverly’, andbukiyooni-mo ‘clumsily’. Of particular interest is the meaning alternation be-tween the so-called ‘manner’ and ‘clausal’ readings that is observed in bothEnglish and Japanese. Henceforth, I will refer to this phenomenon as the ‘man-ner/clausal alternation’.

It has been observed that in English a class of adverbs such as stupidly,cleverly and clumsily have more than one interpretation when they appear inthe auxiliary position as in (1-a), whereas the meaning is unambiguous whenthey appear in the sentence-initial position (1-b) or the final position (1-c)(Jackendoff 1972).1

(1) a. John stupidly danced. (Ambiguous)(i) ‘The manner in which John danced was stupid.’(ii) ‘It was stupid of John to have danced.’

b. Stupidly, John danced. (Unambiguous)‘It was stupid of John to have danced.’

c. John danced stupidly. (Unambiguous)‘The manner in which John danced was stupid.’

While adverbs in the auxiliary position allow both the manner interpre-tation (‘the manner in which . . . ’) and the ‘clausal’, or the ‘sentential’, in-terpretation (‘it was stupid of John to . . . ’), adverbs in the sentence-initialposition can only be construed in the clausal interpretation, and adverbs inthe sentence-final position can only be construed in the manner interpretation.

There are some general questions regarding this phenomenon. First of all,are adverbs of this kind lexically ambiguous? If not, how are the two in-terpretations derived from a single lexical source? Either way, what is the

1 Wyner (2008: 255) notes that adverbs can be interpreted as manner adverbs even inthe sentence initial position, when “the overall sentence implies a contrast; that is, we use[(i)] to deny some previous assertion” (for example, in a context where the speaker wantsto deny the statement “Bill kissed Jill reluctantly”).

(i) Passionately, Bill kissed Jill.In this paper, I do not consider cases that involve this additional focus effect.

Transforming Manner Adverbs into Subject-Oriented Adverbs 3

lexical/semantic relation between the two interpretations? Furthermore, howcommon is this lexical relation cross-linguistically? In this paper, I take a lookat this kind of manner/clausal alternation in Japanese, in which there is amorphological distinction between manner adverbs and clausal adverbs unlikein English, and propose a compositional semantic analysis of the two readings.

As shown above, in English, it is the position of the adverb that disam-biguates the interpretation. In Japanese, the two readings are instead dis-ambiguated morphologically. As Sawada (1978) notes, orokani ‘stupidly’ onlyhas the manner reading, whereas orokani-mo in (3) with the particle mo onlyhas the clausal reading, both regardless of the position in the sentence.2 Thismeans that there is no ambiguity of the kind found in the English example(1-a).

(2) a. John-waJohn-top

orokanistupidly

odotta.danced.

‘John danced stupidly.’ (Unambiguous; Manner only)b. Orokani

stupidlyJohn-waJohn-top

odotta.danced.

‘John danced stupidly.’ (Unambiguous; Manner only)


orokani-mostupidly

odotta.danced.

‘Stupidly, John danced.’ (Unambiguous; Clausal only)b. Orokani-mo

stupidlyJohn-waJohn-top

odotta.danced.

‘Stupidly, John danced.’ (Unambiguous; Clausal only)

Morphologically speaking, it seems as if the particle mo transforms a man-ner adverb into the corresponding clausal adverb.

(4) manner adverb + mo → clausal adverb

According to Sawada (1978), this particle, as far as this phenomenon is con-cerned, is a kind of interjectional particle which has a function that marks thespeaker’s subjective attitude toward the proposition.3

2 In Japanese, the position of adverbs within a sentence is quite free as long as they precedethe verb. Focusing (by adding phonological prominence, for example) does not affect theinterpretation of the adverb as far as the manner/clausal alternation is concerned.

3 The interjectional use of mo is often called eetan no mo ‘exclamatory mo’ such as in(i).

(i) Kono-ko-moThis-child-mo

zuibuna.lot

ookiku-nattabig-became

naa.excl

‘This child has become so big!’

Mo is found in other uses, e.g. as an additive particle and (a part of) NPIs as shown below.

(ii) a. John-moJohn-mo

kita.came.

‘John also came (in addition to someone else).’

4 Ai Kubota

This mo-alternation occurs systematically with adverbs such as kashikoku(-mo) ‘cleverly’, daitanni(-mo) ‘boldly’, namaikini(-mo) ‘impertinently’, tee-neeni(-mo) ‘carefully; politely’, shinsetsuni(-mo) ‘kindly’, busahooni(-mo)‘rudely’, and so on. However, this morphological alternation is found only withadverbs that have adjectival stems. Thus, for example, the manner adverbkichinto ‘neatly; decently; properly’, which does not have an adjectival coun-terpart, does not have the manner/clausal alternation (*kichinto-mo), thus noclausal use, even though there is nothing semantically anomalous about thewould-be clausal meaning of this adverb (e.g., ‘Neatly, they gave us an extrapillow and towel.’).

As far as the Japanese data are concerned, it seems natural to hypoth-esize that, for adverbs that display the manner/clausal alternation, clausaladverbs (which are morphologically more complex) are derived from manneradverbs. However, in the previous literature on this alternation (in English),it is still controversial whether the clausal meaning and the manner meaningshare the same lexical source. For example, while McConnell-Ginet (1982) pro-poses to derive clausal adverbs from manner adverbs, other authors such asErnst (2002), Rawlins (2008), Geuder (2002) pursue an opposite approach inwhich manner adverbs are derived from clausal adverbs. There is still one morepossibility, that is, to say that these adverbs are lexically ambiguous, which isa position taken by Wyner (2008), and possibly Pinon (2010) too. However,this last approach, if it is simply assumed that the manner adverb stupidlyand the clausal adverb stupidly each have distinct and unrelated lexical en-tries, seems to lose the insight that these two kinds of adverbs are somehowrelated and that this relation is not accidental but systematic and observableacross languages.

In the following section, I review the previous studies just mentioned andpoint out problems and difficulties that they face in analyzing especially theJapanese data just introduced. Then in section 3, I propose my analysis ofmanner/clausal alternating adverbs, building on ideas from Ernst (2002) andMcConnell-Ginet (1982). In section 4, I discuss passive sensitivity, a phe-nomenon in which passive sentences with an adverb of a certain class havemore than one interpretation, even though the corresponding active sentenceswith the same adverb have only one interpretation. The passive sensitivitydata discussed in this section will make clear why I adopt the terminology‘surface-subject-oriented adverb’ (instead of the more familiar ‘agent-orientedadverb’) for Japanese in this paper (see below). In section 5, I briefly discussa class of adverbs often called evaluative adverbs, which also undergo the moattachment in Japanese. Section 6 summarizes and concludes the paper.

b. Dare-moWho-mo

ko-nakatta.come-neg.pst

‘No one came.’

I do not know whether it is possible to have a unified analysis that covers all the instancesof mo.


Before moving on to the next section, let me clarify the terminology andthe classification of adverbs that I assume throughout this paper. As for theEnglish adverbs, I adopt the classification used in Ernst 2002. As for theJapanese adverbs, I suggest a slightly different terminology in order to reflectthe behavioral difference between adverbs in Japanese and adverbs in English.

According to Ernst (2002), the adverb stupidly in its clausal sense as in(1-b) belongs to the class of adverbs called agent-oriented adverbs, which is asubclass of subject-oriented adverbs as in (5). The adverb stupidly as in (1-c)belongs to a different class of adverbs, i.e., manner adverbs. 4

(5) Subject-oriented adverbs (Ernst 2002)a. Agent-oriented adverbs: cleverly, stupidly, wisely, tactfully, fool-

ishly, rudely, secretly, ostentatiously, intelligentlyb. Mental attitude adverbs: reluctantly, calmly, willingly, anxiously,

eagerly, frantically, absent-mindedly, gladly, sadly

Subject-oriented adverbs are those that “express some additional informationabout the subject” (Jackendoff 1972: 57), as the paraphrase in (6-b) shows.5

(6) a. {Cleverly/Reluctantly}, John spilled the beans.b. John was {clever/reluctant} to spill the beans.

Among subject-oriented adverbs, what Ernst calls agent-oriented adverbs arethose that “indicate that an event is such as to judge its agent as ADJ withrespect to the event” (Ernst 2002: 54), whereas what he calls mental atti-tude adverbs are those that “describe, most fundamentally, a state of mindexperienced by the referent of the subject of the verb” (ibid.: 63). In whatfollows, I mainly use stupidly and reluctantly as representative examples ofagent-oriented adverbs and mental attitude adverbs respectively.

In addition to subject-oriented adverbs, there is another class of adverbs,which is called speaker-oriented adverbs, following Jackendoff (1972) and Ernst(2002). Speaker-oriented adverbs can also be considered as a kind of clausaladverbs, as they modify clausal elements rather than verb phrases. Amongspeaker-oriented adverbs, there are three subclasses: speech-act (honestly, frankly,roughly, etc.), epistemic (perhaps, probably, maybe, etc.), and evaluative (un-believably, unfortunately, luckily, strangely, etc.). Examples are from Ernst(2002: 69).

(7) a. Honestly, who would do such a thing? (Speech-act adverb)

4 Agent-oriented adverbs are also called “thematically dependent adverbs (TDAs)”(Wyner 1998) and “Ad-VPs” (McConnell-Ginet 1982).

5 As pointed out by one of the reviewers, the paraphrase in (i-b) is not appropriate forsome of the adverbs listed in (5), e.g., *John was {secret/calm} to spill the beans. Since theadverbs secretly and calmly does not appear in Jackendoff’s (1972) list of subject-orientedadverbs, it is either the case that the paraphrase ‘SUBJ was ADJ to . . . ’ is not adequate forsubject-oriented adverbs or the adverbs secretly and calmly are not supposed to be classifiedas subject-oriented adverbs. See also footnote 7.

6 Ai Kubota

b. The markets will perhaps respond to lower interest rates. (Epis-temic adverb)

c. Unbelievably, she decided to buy a camel. (Evaluative adverb)

I briefly discuss evaluative adverbs in Japanese in section 5 to examine whethermy proposal about mo is on the right track, since evaluative adverbs areanother class of adverbs in Japanese that allow the mo-attachment just likeorokani-mo ‘stupidly’.

As for the adverbs in Japanese, I adopt a different terminology. Specifi-cally, I will not call the class of adverbs that includes orokani-mo ‘stupidly(clausal)’ ‘agent-oriented’ adverbs. Instead I will call them ‘surface-subject-oriented adverbs’ (SS-oriented adverbs), since these adverbs in Japanese arenot strictly ‘agent’-oriented (section 3 and section 4.2), and it is misleading tocall them so. As shown in the next section, previous analyses that are basedon observations about agent-oriented adverbs in English cannot be directlyadopted to account for the nature of SS-oriented adverbs in Japanese.

2 Previous Studies on the Manner/Clausal Alternation

There are mainly three possible approaches to the manner/clausal alternation.The first approach is to posit a clausal adverb as the basic and derive a manneradverb form it. The second approach is to posit a manner adverb as the basicand derive a clausal adverb from it. The third approach is to give up derivingone from the other and simply posit two versions for each adverb that exhibitsthe manner/clausal alternation. In the following subsections, I will first reviewErnst 2002, which takes the first approach, and then McConnell-Ginet 1982,which takes the second approach, followed by Pinon 2010, which, as far as Ican tell, goes for the third view.

2.1 Ernst 2002

According to Ernst (2002), the manner and clausal readings of each adverbare closely related to each other in such a way that manner readings are verb-modifying versions of adverbs whose lexical entries are the clause-modifyingadverbs that yield agent-oriented readings. He also points out two major waysin which the two readings differ. The first is that manner readings “describesome sort of external manifestation that may or may not reflect the internalreality” ?? 56]ernst2002. For example, the sentences in (8) ((2.43) in Ernst2002), show that the post-verbal manner adverbs ‘manifest’ (or ‘show proper-ties typical of’) stupidity and cleverness without Alice the spy actually beingstupid or clever at the moment.

(8) a. Alice cleverly answered stupidly in order to keep her identity se-cret.

b. Alice stupidly answered cleverly and gave her secret identity away.


The second difference he points out – the observation which I take to becritical and which will be crucial in my analysis too – is that manner readingsand agent-oriented readings differ in terms of the comparison class for events.Take a pair of examples in (9) ((2.44) in Ernst 2002). In (9-a), “she is judgedrude because of the event of her leaving, as opposed to other things she couldhave done, most especially not leaving”, whereas in (9-b), “she is judged rudeon the basis of something about her leaving – some property of her leavingthat we sometimes call a manner, which distinguishes this leaving event fromother possible leaving events. For example, she might have left without sayinggood-bye, by slamming the door, or with a few choice imprecations on her wayout” ?? 57]ernst2002.

(9) a. Rudely, she left.b. She left rudely.

This means that, for agent-oriented readings the comparison class consists ofvarious possible things that the subject could have done, whereas for man-ner readings, the comparison class is a set of more specific kinds of events(e.g., leaving events in the above example). As Ernst (2002) notes, the no-tion of comparison class is necessary anyway for the interpretation of gradablepredicates in general such as tall, hot, cute, and so on. Since adverbs such asstupidly, cleverly, and so on, are indeed gradable (as we can form a questionthat specifically asks the degree, e.g., How stupidly did he dance? ), compari-son classes undoubtedly play a role in the interpretations of these adverbs too.Therefore, it is desirable to adopt the notion of comparison class, which is anindependently motivated notion, if comparison class is the key to distinguishthe two meanings.

As for the semantic representations of manner and agent-oriented adverbsand how they are related to each other, Ernst (2002) takes the agent-orientedversion in (10-a) as basic (the lexical entry for the adverb rudely), and proposesan operation called the Manner Rule which converts an agent-oriented adverbinto the corresponding manner adverb (10-b).6

(10) a. The event e warrants positing more rudeness in Agent than thenorm for events. 7

b. The event e manifests more rudeness in Agent than the norm forSpecified Events.8

Although I agree that the notion of comparison class plays a crucial rolefor gradable adverbs, there are remaining questions for this approach boththeoretically and empirically. First, from a theoretical point of view, thereis room for discussion on the adequacy of the Manner Rule. For example,

6 For the precise implementation of the Manner Rule, see Chapter 2 in Ernst 2002.7 If Ernst’s (2002) analysis is correct, secretly cannot really be an example of agent-

oriented adverbs, since the expression ‘the event e warrants positing more secret in Agentthan the norm for events’ is not straightforwardly interpretable (see also footnote 5).

8 ‘Specified Events’ in (10-b) is determined by the verb phrase that the adverb modifies.

8 Ai Kubota

at what point of derivation does this rule apply? Is there any restriction forthe application of this rule? Is this a language-specific rule? How does theManner Rule fit in a framework of compositional semantics? Furthermore,there is an empirical difficulty especially when we turn to the manner/clausalalternation in Japanese. Note that in Japanese it is manner adverbs that aremorphologically simplex.9

(11)

mo-attachment−−−−−−−−−→manner adverb SS-oriented adverb

orokani ‘stupidly’ orokani-mo ‘stupidly’←−−−−−−−−−−−−−Ernst’s Manner Rule

If we directly adopt Ernst’s (2002) approach (i.e., if we take agent-orientedadverbs to be basic and adopted the Manner Rule), then we would have toassume that mo’s function is to cancel the application of the Manner Rule(since the mo-less version is unambiguously a manner adverb). Alternatively,we might assume that the lexical item orokani (with an underlying agent-oriented meaning) is never interpretable without the obligatory application ofthe Manner Rule, or with the attachment of a semantically vacuous morphememo. But it seems highly unlikely that a lexical item that is never interpretablewithout an obligatory application of an additional lexical operation like theManner Rule (which itself is already a highly unnatural situation) becomessuddenly interpretable in the presence of an overt but meaningless morpheme.Thus, as far as the Japanese data is concerned, I suggest to take the other way,that is, compositionally deriving the clausal reading via the combination of themanner adverb and mo. Although I depart from Ernst’s (2002) approach inthis respect, I adopt his idea of capturing the difference between agent-orientedand manner readings via the notion of comparison class.

2.2 McConnell-Ginet (1982)

According to McConnell-Ginet (1982), adverbs are always construed directlywith a verb.10 In the case of manner adverbs as in (12), the adverb rudely isconstrued with the verb departed, and adds some meaning to the verb. On theother hand, agent-oriented adverbs in (13) are not syntactically sisters to theverb departed but to the higher abstract verb acted.

(12) a. Surface structure: Louisa departed rudely.

9 This pattern in which the manner adverb is morphologically simpler does not seemto be limited to Japanese, as it is also attested in other languages such as German (e.g.,klugerweise ‘cleverly’, which consists of klug ‘clever’ and weise, can only be interpreted as aagent-oriented adverb). The Manner Rule would be more convincing if there is a significantnumber of languages in which the morphological relation between the two adverbs is theopposite of (11). I do not know of any such language.10 To be more precise, adverbs are actually considered as an argument of the verb and not

really a modifier.


b. LF: Louisa [ departed rudely ]

(13) a. Surface structure: Louisa rudely departed. (rudely with an agent-oriented meaning)

b. LF: Louisa [ acted rudely to depart ]

In this approach, the interpretation of an adverb depends on which verb theadverb is construed with, either the main verb depart or the higher, abstractverb act. The manner adverb meaning is considered as semantically basic,and the agent-oriented reading is obtained by positing a different syntacticstructure (which receives a different semantic interpretation).

This idea seems to be plausible especially for the Japanese manner/clausalalternation, since it allows us to analyze the manner adverb orokani as thebasic form. If this essentially syntactic analysis of the alternation is on theright track, then we might take it to mean that mo is a morpheme that signalsthat the adverb is located somewhere higher in the structure. In this way, wewould not have to rely on a special operation like the Manner Rule.

However, this approach has been criticized in the literature, especially withrespect to the adequacy of a higher verb like act. For example, Geuder (2002)points out that a sentence like John departed cannot be paraphrased as Johnacted to depart. He also raises a question with respect to the contrast be-tween she acted rudely and she rudely acted. In order to capture the differencebetween the two, the latter has to be analyzed as she acted rudely to act.However, as Geuder (2002) points out, it is not clear what act to act means.

2.3 Pinon (2010)

With Geuder’s (2002) criticism in mind, Pinon (2010) argues that there is ahigher verb decide instead of act. Furthermore, he argues that this higher verbdecide does not exist by itself somewhere in the structure but is introducedby the agent-oriented adverb. That is, the meaning of decide is part of themeaning of agent-oriented adverbs. Thus, there are two different lexical entriesfor stupidly, one for the manner reading (14-a) and the other for the agent-oriented reading (14-b).11

(14) a. Manner: JstupidlymK= λVv,tλe.V (e) ∧ stupid(e)b. Agent-Oriented: JstupidlyaK=

λW〈e,vt〉λxλe.∃e′′[decide(e′′, x, [λe′.W (e′, x)])∧CAUSE(e′′, e) ∧W (e, x) ∧ stupid(e′′)

]In short, what is described as stupid in (14-a) is the event of V , where V isdenoted by the verb that the adverb modifies. In (14-b), on the other hand,what is described as stupid is not the event of V but the event of x’s deciding

11 In the original proposal, the clausal argument of ‘decide’ is intensionalized. I have re-produced a simplified entry in (14) since this aspect of the analysis does not affect ourdiscussion below.

10 Ai Kubota

to do W , where W is denoted by the verb. In other words, stupidly, Johndanced means that the event of John’s deciding to dance was stupid but doesnot necessarily mean that the event of John’s dancing was.

Setting aside how precisely the above denotations work compositionallyand assuming that these two versions of stupidly derive manner and agent-oriented meanings respectively, we are now back to our original puzzle: howare manner readings and agent-oriented readings related to each other? Shouldwe give up deriving one of the two readings from the other and go for lexicalambiguity? Of course, it is not impossible to derive one from the other, forexample, via the following operation that converts manner adverbs into agent-oriented ones.

(15)[λSvt,vtλWe,vtλxeλev.∃e′′

[CAUSE(e′′, e) ∧W (e, x)∧S(e′′, λe.decide(e, x, [λe′.W (e′, x)])))

]](JstupidlymK)

=λWλxλe.∃e′′[

CAUSE(e′′, e) ∧W (e, x)∧JstupidlymK(e′′, λe.decide(e, x, [λe′.W (e′, x)])))

]= λWλxλe.∃e′′

[CAUSE(e′′, e) ∧W (e, x)∧decide(e′′, x, [λe′.W (e′, x)]) ∧ stupid(e′′)

]= JstupidlyaK

However, it is unclear what this operation is and how common it is. Clearly,this is not a simple type-shifting operation, but something that introduces thehigher verb decide and a causal relation between the two events (x’s decisionof doing W and x’s doing W ). It remains unclear how general this kind ofoperation is cross-categorically, within a language, and across languages.

Moreover, there is another concern regarding the higher verb decide. Thatis, whenever there is an agent-oriented adverb, the sentence is always pre-dicted to mean that the subject decided to do the action. What, then, abouta sentence like (16), where John didn’t decide to die/fall?:

(16) John-waJohn-top

orokani-mostupidly-mo

{shinda/koronda}.{died/fell}

‘Stupidly, John died/fell.’

The prediction is that the agent-oriented adverb orikani-mo introduces thehigher verb decide and thus the sentence means that the subject decided to die.However, the sentence does not necessarily mean that John committed suicide.It simply means that it was stupid of him to have died, either voluntarily orby doing something (perhaps inadvertently) that eventually led him to dieagainst his will. I will come back to this example at the end of section 3.

The fundamental problem of this approach lies in the assumption thatagent-oriented adverbs introduce a higher verb decide as part of their mean-ings. Not only is it problematic for accounting for data like (16) but it also losesMcConnell-Ginet’s (1982) insight that adverbs like stupidly are fundamentallymanner adverbs (or Ad-Verbs in her term) and that the agent-oriented readingis sololy derivable from a structural difference.


2.4 Summary

In this section, we saw three approaches to the manner/clausal alternation:deriving the manner meaning from the agent-oriented (or, clausal) meaning,deriving the agent-oriented meaning from the manner meaning, and lexicalambiguity. Ernst’s (2002) analysis nicely captures the difference between thetwo meanings in terms of comparison classes. However, since it takes the firstapproach, the analysis is not suitable for Japanese, given the morphologicalcomplexity of the form associated with the clausal reading. In this respect,McConnell-Ginet’s (1982) idea that agent-oriented adverbs are originally man-ner adverbs is appropriate for the Japanese data, if we assume that mo is akind of syntactic marker that forces the adverb to be located structurallyhigher. A problem remains, however, with respect to the higher abstract verbact, as pointed out by Geuder (2002) and Pinon (2010). A lexical ambiguityapproach (Geuder 2002, Pinon 2010) cannot adequately explain why there isa tight connection between certain kinds of adverbs across languages.

In the next section, I propose an analysis adopting two important insightsfrom the previous literature. One is the idea of comparison class from Ernst2002 and the other is the idea from McConnell-Ginet 1982 that the man-ner reading is the basic and the clausal reading is derived from it. UnlikeMcConnell-Ginet’s (1982) idea, however, I propose that the difference betweenthe two readings is not solely due to the structural differences but also becauseof the effect of mo that changes the semantics of the adverbs it attaches to.

3 Deriving Clausal Readings from Manner Adverbs

Let us remind ourselves what the puzzle was. In English, adverbs like stupidlyand cleverly have the manner reading (‘the manner in which x did V wasstupid’) and the clausal reading (‘It was stupid of x to do V ’), and disam-biguation is possible by word order – sentence-final adverbs give rise to mannerreadings and sentence-initial adverbs give rise to agent-oriented/clausal read-ings. In Japanese, the two readings are instead distinguished morphologically:orokani ‘stupidly’ (manner) in the simplex form vs. orokani-mo ‘stupidly’(clausal) with mo. Based on this morphological fact, I will pursue an approachthat compositionally derives the clausal reading from the manner reading. Insection 3.1, I analyze the manner adverb orokani incorporating the notion ofcomparison class from Ernst 2002. In section 3.2, I propose that the same man-ner adverb, when mo is attached, is turned into a clausal adverb. The reasonwhy the meaning changes from a manner meaning to a clausal meaning is notbecause the adverb is adjoined to a head such as act, decide, nor any otherkind of head that is responsible for the agent thematic role, but because itscomparison class is readjusted to a broader one by adjoining mo. Thus, onthis approach, examples like (16) – in which adverbs like orokani-mo induceclausal readings despite the absence of an agent – are unproblematic.

12 Ai Kubota

3.1 Manner Adverb orokani ‘stupidly’

Throughout the paper, I adopt a fairly common syntactic assumption that allthe syntactic arguments are base-generated within VP (or vP depending on thesyntactic framework), and that the subject is later moved to Spec, TP in orderto be assigned case. For the sake of simplicity, I ignore the temporal meaningand assume that T is essentially semantically vacuous. The following showsthe derivation for a simple sentence John-ga odotta ‘John danced’ without anadverb.

(17) TPλe.dance(John)(e)

NP

John-ga

T′

λxλe.dance(x)(e)

VPλxλe.dance(x)(e)

odotta

TλPλxλe.P (x)(e)

After the event variable e is existentially bound, the sentence asserts thatthere was an event e such that e was a dancing event by John. Throughoutthe paper, I assume that the event variable is existentially closed at some pointin the same way.

When there is a manner adverb as in (18), I assume that the adverb isadjoined to VP.

(18) John-gaJohn-nom

orokanistupidly

odotta.dance.past

‘John danced stupidly.’

I propose the following denotation for the manner adverb orokani ‘stupidly’.

(19) JorokaniK= λP〈e,vt〉λxλe.P (x)(e)∧stupid(e) > standard(stupid)([λe′∃x′.P (x′)(e′)])

As shown in (19), stupid is a measure function of type 〈v, d〉 – it takes an evente and returns the degree of stupidity of e. standard(stupid)([λe′∃x′.P (x′)(e′)])gives the standard degree of stupidity, where what counts as ‘standard’ isdetermined by the comparison class λe′∃x′.P (x′)(e′), a set of P -ing events bysome individual x′. In the case of adjectives, the comparison class is a set ofindividuals – of type 〈e, t〉 (von Stechow 1984). For adverbs, on the other hand,I assume that the comparison class is a set of events – of type 〈v, t〉.

The way in which the meaning is expressed in (19) is based on one of thestandard views on gradable adjectives, according to which the truth condi-


tions of gradable adjectives in their positive forms involve a context-dependentstandard degree. To be more precise, the representation in (19) should be con-sidered as a combination of orokani and a null degree morpheme pos (vonStechow 1984, Kennedy 1997) just like gradable adjectives such as tall, ex-pensive, cute, and so on. The pos morpheme is responsible for the notion ofstandard degree and comparison class. In the case of comparatives, a compar-ative morpheme (more or -er in English) replaces the pos morpheme and thusthere will be no standard degree determined context-dependently. Indeed, wedo find a comparative form of adverbs (e.g., more stupidly), which calls fora compositional analysis extending the analysis of adjectival comparatives toadverbial comparatives. It is possible to deal with the comparative form ofadverbs if we adopt the idea shared among the analyses of adjectival compar-atives in general that the gradable predicate itself only contributes a mappingrelation between individuals (or, here, events) and degrees and that the ref-erence to the contextual standard (if any) is separately contributed by theempty pos operator. In this paper, however, I simply express the meaning ofgradable adverbs as a combination of measure function and pos for the sakeof convenience.

Let us now turn to the example (18) and see how the meaning is derivedcompositionally.

(20) TPλe.dance(John)(e)∧

stupid(e) > standard(stupid)(λe′∃x′.dance(x′)(e′))

NP

John-ga

T′

λxλe. dance(x)(e)∧stupid(e) > standard(stupid)([λe′∃x′.dance(x′)(e′)])

VPλxλe. dance(x)(e)∧

stupid(e) > standard(stupid)([λe′∃x′.dance(x′)(e′)])

AdvPλPλxλe. P (x)(e)∧

stupid(e) > standard(stupid)([λe′∃x′.P (x′)(e′)])

orokani


odotta

TλPλxλe.P (x)(e)

14 Ai Kubota

The derived meaning is as follows: there was an event e such that e was adancing event by John, and the stupidity of e is greater than the standard stu-pidity, where the standard is determined by the comparison class that consistsof various kinds of dancing events involving some individual x′ as the dancer.Since the comparison class is restricted to a specific kind of event (in this case,dancing events) what counts as stupid is based on this restricted set, e.g. {x′’sdancing with precise steps, x′’s dancing with a smooth hand movement, x′’sdancing with his eyes rolled up into his head, . . .}. This is similar to the sen-tence ‘John did a stupid dance’ in which the adjective stupid directly modifiesthe noun dance.

Just like gradable adjectives such as small and big as in a small elephantand a big mouse, what counts as stupid depends on the comparison class that iseither explicitly mentioned or implicitly understood in the discourse. A smallelephant could be bigger than a big mouse, in which case the individual is“small for an elephant” or “big for a mouse”. Similarly, the event that Johnhas engaged in does not have to be stupid in all respects and John himself doesnot have to be stupid, but what he did was a stupid way or kind of dancing.12

3.2 Clausal Adverb orokani-mo ‘stupidly’

With the same denotation proposed in (19) for the manner adverb orokani‘stupidly’, it is possible to derive the clausal reading when the particle mois adjoined first to adjust the comparison class appropriately. I propose thedenotation of mo as in (21). The first argument A is supposed to be suppliedby an adverb of type 〈〈e, vt〉, 〈e, vt〉〉.

(21) JmoK= λA〈〈e,vt〉,〈e,vt〉〉λPλxλe.A(λx′λe′.∃Q[Q(x′)(e′)])(x)(e) ∧ P (x)(e)

This is, in some sense, like the additive particle also – it introduces an addi-tional predicate Q, in addition to the predicate P denoted by the VP.13 Modenotes a function from type 〈〈e, vt〉, 〈e, vt〉〉 to 〈〈e, vt〉, 〈e, vt〉〉 – it takes anadverb as an argument and returns a function of the same type. Thus, when itcombines with the adverb orokani, it changes the adverb in the following way:

12 In this connection, I should note that there are proposals that view manner modificationas event kind modification (Landman and Morzycki 2003, Anderson and Morzycki 2014,Gehrke 2014). It would be interesting to see if it is possible to integrate the notion ofcomparison class and event kind modification, a task which I leave for future research.13 Recall from above that mo has this additive function as one of its meanings (see footnote

3), but I will set aside further discussion on a more comprehensive analysis of mo.


(22) JmoK(JorokaniK)

=

λA〈〈e,vt〉,〈e,vt〉〉λPλxλe.A(λx′λe′.∃Q[Q(x′)(e′)])(x)(e)∧P (x)(e)

(λP ′〈e,vt〉λx′′λe′′. P ′(x′′)(e′′)∧

stupid(e′′) > standard(stupid)([λe′′′∃x′′′.P ′(x′′′)(e′′′)])

)

=λPλxλe

∃Q[Q(x)(e)]∧stupid(e) > standard(stupid)(λe′∃x′′′.∃Q[Q(x′′′)(e′)])∧P (x)(e)

I suggest that the clausal adverb orokani-mo is adjoined to T′. The follow-

ing represents the derivation for the clausal meaning of orokani-mo.

(23) TPλe.∃Q[Q(John)(e)]

∧stupid(e) > standard(stupid)(λe′∃x′′′∃Q[Q(x′′′)(e′)])∧dance(John)(e)

NP

John-ga

T′

λxλe.∃Q[Q(x)(e)]∧stupid(e) > standard(stupid)(λe′∃x′′′∃Q[Q(x′′′)(e′)])

∧dance(x)(e)

AdvPλPλxλe.∃Q[Q(x)(e)]∧

stupid(e) > standard(stupid)(λe′∃x′′′∃Q[Q(x′′′)(e′)])∧P (x)(e)

Adv

orokani

mo

T′

λxλe.dance(x)(e)


odotta

TλPλxλe.P (x)(e)

The derived meaning is as follows: there was an event e such that e is adancing event by John. In addition, there is another way Q to describe e –for example, it could be ‘John’s moving’. However, since it only mentions theexistence of such a predicate Q, it is semantically trivial. The stupidity of e isgreater than the standard stupidity, where the standard is determined by thecomparison class that consists of a set of events e′. The comparison class isnot restricted to the specific kind of events like various kinds of dancing butit is a set of events e′ such that one could have involved in that event in someway or another. Importantly, the representation in (23) does not entail thatJohn the subject is stupid. It simply says that the event that John danced wasstupid considering other things that one could have done. I believe that thisis correct because by saying “Stupidly, John danced”, it does not mean that

16 Ai Kubota

John is stupid and he danced. What is expressed in (23) is more like “ThatJohn danced was stupid”.14

In this way, I adopt the idea of comparison class from Ernst 2002 and let motransform a manner adverb into the corresponding clausal adverb by adjustingthe comparison class of the adverb. This analysis departs from his analysis,however, in that instead of employing the Manner Rule to transform a clausalmeaning into a manner meaning, I derive the clausal meaning compositionallyfrom the manner meaning. In this respect, the present proposal is similar inspirit to McConnell-Ginet’s (1982), although it is different from her analysis aswell, since it is not dependent on an abstract verbal head such as act or decidethat is responsible for introducing an agentive argument of some kind. As faras the Japanese data is concerned, the present analysis is more appropriate inview of cases in which no agent is arguably involved in the event expressed bythe sentence.

It is commonly argued that the subject of unaccusative verbs such as die,fall, arrive and, so on, is actually base-generated as the complement of theverb just like direct objects, and is assigned the patient or theme role instead ofthe agent role. The argument is then promoted to the surface subject positionbecause of the case assignment reason. Adverbs like orokani-mo can appearin a sentence with an unaccusative verb, as already pointed out and repeatedbelow.

(16) John-waJohn-top


{shinda/koronda}.{died/fell}

‘Stupidly, John died/fell.’

If we analyze clausal adverbs like orokani-mo ‘stupidly’ as strictly agent-oriented adverbs, (16) will be predicted to be unacceptable. The proposedanalysis does not rule out examples like (16), since what the adverb is ori-ented to is not what ensures the agentive subject but simply T′, which istypically considered as a sister to the surface subject.

One might wonder why clausal adverbs have to be located at T′ and not VP.It is true, if we restrict our attention to sentences in the active voice, that wecan derive exactly the same meaning in the end by assuming that orokani-mo‘stupidly (clausal)’ is a VP modifier (assuming that tense does not directlyaffect the meaning of the adverb). However, as I will show in section 4, itbecomes clear why it is better to have SS-oriented adverbs with mo at the T′

level and not within VP when we turn to the behavior of SS-oriented adverbsin Japanese in passive sentences. The prediction is that if clausal adverbs inJapanese (i.e., SS-oriented adverbs) are indeed adjoined to T′ and are alwaysoriented to the surface subject, then they are always oriented to the surfacesubject (the patient or theme argument in passive sentences) and never to the

14 In connection to footnote 5, this paraphrase can handle adverbs such as secretly as insecretly, John danced. While it does not make sense to say “it was secret of John to havedanced”, the alternative paraphrase “that John danced was secret” may come close to whatit is intended to mean.


underlying subject (the agent argument). As I show in the next section, thisis indeed the case in Japanese.

4 SS-Oriented Adverbs and Passive Sensitivity

In this section, I compare SS-oriented adverbs (or agent-oriented adverbs inEnglish) and mental attitude adverbs with respect to the issue of passivesensitivity. After introducing the basic facts about this phenomenon observedboth in English and in Japanese, I show that Japanese SS-oriented adverbslike orokani-mo ‘stupidly’ are not passive sensitive – they can only be orientedto the surface subject – unlike English agent-oriented adverbs. I also pointout that there is a clear contrast between SS-oriented adverbs and mentalattitude adverbs. I propose that the reason is because the mo-attached adverbsare always T′-adjoined whereas the mo-less ones are attached lower in thestructure.

4.1 Passive sensitivity

It has been observed that some subject-oriented adverbs such as reluctantly,intentionally, and deliberately are passive sensitive (McConnell-Ginet 1982,Wyner 1998).

(24) a. Kim reluctantly hit Sandy. (Active; unambiguous)→Kim was reluctant.

b. Sandy was reluctantly hit by Kim. (Passive; ambiguous)(i) →Sandy was reluctant.(ii) →Kim was reluctant.

While the active sentence (24-a) has only one interpretation, namely, one inwhich the subject (Agent) is reluctant, the passive sentence (24-b) has twopossible interpretations: either the surface subject (Patient) was reluctant orthe underlying subject (Agent) was.

According to McConnell-Ginet (1982), the reason for this ambiguity inpassive sentences is that there are two possible structural positions for theadverb to attach to in the passive construction. The idea is that in passivesentences, the passive auxiliary be may be interpreted as the ‘active’ be asproposed by Partee (1977) or the predicate act in Dowty 1979. In such a case,there are two verbs (or VPs) for the adverb to modify – either the lower verbhit or the higher verb be. This is illustrated in (25) below.

18 Ai Kubota

(25) a. S

NP

Sandy

VP2

V

was

VP1

ADV

reluctantly

V

hit

PP

by Kim

b. S

NP

Sandy

VP2

ADV

reluctatnly

V

was

VP1

hit by Kim

When the adverb reluctantly is construed with the lower verb (VP1) as in(25-a), it is oriented to the subject (Agent) of hit, whereas in case the adverbis construed with the higher verb (VP2) as in (25-b), it is oriented to thesubject of active be, which is the underlying Patient of the verb hit. Dependingon the attachment site, the interpretation of the adverb changes, specificallywith respect who is reluctant. By contrast, in active sentences like (24-a), noambiguity arises, since there is no passive auxiliary that the adverb can beconstrued with.15

Passive sensitivity is also observed in Japanese just like in English.


Mary-oMary-acc

iyaiyareluctantly

dakishimeta.hug.past

‘John reluctantly hugged Mary.’ (Unambiguous)→John was reluctant.

b. Mary-waMary-top

John-{ni/niyotte}John-{by/by}

iyaiyareluctantly

dakishime-rareta.hug-passive.past

‘Mary was reluctantly hugged by John.’ (Ambiguous)(i) →John was reluctant.(ii) →Mary was reluctant.

15 For Wyner (1998), the ambiguity is not explained in terms of structural differences, butby assuming that there are two kinds of passive be: one that is semantically vacuous andthe other that assigns a volitional meaning to the subject. In this view, however, not onlydo we need two kinds of be, but also two different ways to interpret the main verb: one withvolition and the other without.


So it seems that the same explanation holds for the Japanese case as well. How-ever, not all adverbs behave in this way. As I show below, some subject-orientedadverbs, including orokani-mo ‘stupidly’, do not exhibit passive sensitivity.

4.2 Mental attitude adverbs vs. SS-oriented adverbs

In the previous subsection, we have only considered passive sensitivity withrespect to the subject-oriented adverb reluctantly. Although both reluctantlyand stupidly are examples of subject-oriented adverbs, they are said to belongto different subcategories of subject-oriented adverbs – stupidly is a repre-sentative of agent-oriented adverbs and reluctantly is that of mental-attitudeadverbs – as mentioned in section 1. According to Ernst (2002), the two typesof subject-oriented adverbs differ in terms of their semantic representations.Schematically, the interpretation of agent-oriented adverbs generally looks like(27), whereas for mental attitude adverbs, the interpretation looks like (28).

(27) The event e warrants positing more PADJ in Agent than the norm forevents.

(28) The event e is {accompanied by/intended with} a greater degree ofADJ by Experiencer (subject) than the norm for Experiencer.

Setting aside the subtle difference among the expressions ‘warrants positing’and ‘accompanied by/intended with’, the major difference between the twotypes of subject-oriented adverbs seems to be the kind of comparison classes.For mental attitude adverbs, the comparison class is “restricted to the expe-riencers and is not determined by events” (Ernst 2002:pp. 62).

Ernst (2002) notes that mental attitude adverbs such as reluctantly alsotend to have two interpretations just like agent-oriented adverbs – the clausal(mental attitude) reading (29-a) and the manner reading (29-b). In (29-a), thesubject is the experiencer, thus she is indeed reluctant. On the other hand,in (29-b), the subject may not necessarily be reluctant – she might just beshowing such a behavior but she could be happy in her heart.

(29) a. Mindy has reluctantly been going to accounting classes.b. Mindy has been going to accounting classes reluctantly.

This seems to suggest that despite the difference between the two types ofsubject-oriented adverbs (mental attitude and agent-oriented adverbs), themechanism of manner/clausal alternation is essentially the same.

However, the difference between mental attitude adverbs and SS-orientedadverbs in Japanese seems to be more distinct compared to the difference be-tween mental attitude adverbs and agent-oriented adverbs in English with re-spect to manner/clausal alternation and passive sensitivity. First, with JapaneseSS-oriented adverbs, we saw that the manner/clausal alternation involved moattachment, whereas mental attitude adverbs in Japanese are not compatiblewith mo attachment. Since mental attitude adverbs in Japanese do not have

20 Ai Kubota

the manner reading, as shown in (30-a), the only way to express the mannermeaning is to employ a related but distinct modifier specifically referring tothe manner such as iyagatta yoosu-de ‘in a reluctant way’ in (30-b).


iyaiyareluctantly

gakkoo-nischool-to

kayotteiru.commute.npst

(#demo,(But

hontoo-waactually

gakkoo-gaschool-nom

suki-da.)favorite-cop.npst)

‘John reluctantly goes to school. (#But, actually, he likes school.)’

b. John-waJohn-top

iyagattareluctant

yoosu-demanner-in

gakkoo-nischool-to

kayotteiru.commute.past

(demo,(But

hontoo-waactually

gakkoo-gaschool-nom

suki-da.)favorite-cop.npst)

‘John went to class reluctantly. (But, actually, he likes school.)’

In English, on the other hand, there is no morphological distinction betweenthe manner and clausal readings.

Secondly, while both mental attitude adverbs and agent-oriented adverbsare passive sensitive in English, only mental attitude adverbs, but not SS-oriented adverbs, are passive sensitive in Japanese. In English, not only mentalattitude adverbs but also agent-oriented adverbs seem to be passive sensitiveas shown below.16

(31) Mary was stupidly hugged by John.a. (??)It was stupid of Mary to have been hugged by John.b. It was stupid of John to have hugged Mary.

By contrast, SS-oriented adverbs are never passive sensitive in Japanese. Theadverb orokani-mo ‘stupidly’ in the passive construction can only target thesurface subject and never the underlying subject, and this judgement is quiteclear among native speakers.

(32) Mary-waMary-top


John-niJohn-by

dakishime-rareta.hug-passive.past

‘Stupidly Mary was hugged by John.’a. It was stupid of Mary to have been hugged by John.b. NOT: It was stupid of John to have hugged Mary.

As shown above in (26), it is not the case that passive sensitivity is not observedat all in Japanese – it is observed with mental attitude adverbs.

At this point, it is worth noting that mental attitude adverbs in Japaneseare generally incompatible with mo, unlike SS-oriented adverbs, e.g. iyaiya ‘re-

16 However, it is less clear compared to mental attitude adverbs whether they are reallypassive sensitive according to the native speakers I consulted with. While some speakersaccept both readings in (31), others report that it is difficult to interpret it as (31-a), hencethe marking ‘(??)’.


luctantly, unwillingly’, shibushibu ‘grudgingly, reluctantly’, shikatanaku ‘invol-untarily’, yorokonde ‘happily’, shinpaisooni ‘anxiously’, ochitsuite ‘calmly’.17

If this observation is correct, then what does the presence/absence of mo tell usabout the contrast between mental attitude adverbs and SS-oriented adverbsin Japanese? Specifically, first, why do SS-oriented adverbs, but not mentalattitude adverbs, undergo the clausal/manner alternation and the mo attach-ment accordingly? And secondly, why do mental attitude adverbs (i.e. thosethat do not have the mo particle) show passive sensitivity but not SS-orientedadverbs?

As for the first question, one possible solution is to propose that the com-parison classes for mental attitude adverbs are fixed, for example as in (33),so that no matter where the adverb shows up in the structure – whether itis adjoined to VP or to T′ – the comparison class is never readjusted. Thus,adverbs are always interpreted as mental attitude adverbs and not as manneradverbs, in which case the comparison class would consist of a set of somespecific kind of events that is denoted by the VP.

(33) JiyaiyaK =

λPλxλe.

[P (x)(e)∧reluctant(e) > standard(reluctant)([λe′.Experiencer(e′) = x])

]In order for an adverb to be shifted to the corresponding manner adverb, itscomparison class needs to be adjusted to a set of some specific kind of events.However, since it is already fixed as a set of events that an individual x withsentience is involved in as an experiencer, there is no way it can be interpretedas a manner adverb.

As for the second question, I suggest that SS-oriented adverbs with moare only allowed to attach to T′. This explains why it is always oriented tothe surface subject. In order for the adverb to be oriented to the underlyingsubject, it needs to be adjoined to the lower VP (i.e. below the higher VP)according to the previous approaches (McConnell-Ginet 1982, Wyner 1998).My suggestion is that this is ruled out since the adverb obligatorily adjoins toT′.

If this idea is on the right track, then one might wonder if there are anyother kinds of adverbs in Japanese that undergo the mo attachment andwhether this explanation still holds. In the next section, we briefly look atone such case – a class of adverbs called evaluative adverbs.

5 Evaluative Adverbs

Let us step back at this point and see where we are. So far, we have mainlydiscussed subject-oriented adverbs such as stupidly – especially those that arecalled agent-oriented adverbs in English and what I call SS-oriented adverbsin Japanese (section 3). We also compared them to mental attitude adverbs,

17 To my knowledge, the only exception is nesshinni-mo ‘eagerly’.

22 Ai Kubota

the other subkind of subject-oriented adverbs, such as reluctantly (section4). I showed that, in Japanese, SS-oriented adverbs behave quite differentlyfrom mental attitude adverbs with respect to the clausal/manner alternationand passive sensitivity. Coincidentally, both phenomena involved the exis-tence/absence of mo. First, I observed that SS-oriented adverbs in Japanese,which happen to be typically attached by mo, are not passive sensitive: pas-sive sentences with SS-oriented adverbs are not ambiguous, contrary to Englishpassive sentences with agent-oriented adverbs. On the other hand, mental at-titude adverbs in Japanese, which happen to be mo-less are passive sensitive:the passive sentences with mental attitude adverbs are ambiguous, as it is alsothe case in English passive sentences with mental attitude adverbs. Based onthis fact, I proposed that the existence of mo indicates that the location of ad-verbs have to be T′ or somewhere external to VP. The purpose of this sectionis to examine whether this proposal is on the right track. To do so, I now turnto another class of adverbs called ‘evaluative adverbs’, such as fukooni-mo ‘un-fortunately’ in the following example, koounni-mo ‘fortunately’, arigataku-mo‘thankfully’, kimyooni(-mo) ‘oddly’, and mezurashiku(-mo) ‘uncommonly’.

(34) Fukooni-moUnfortunately

taifuu-gatyphoon-nom

shima-oisland-acc

chokugeki-shita.direct.hit-did

‘Unfortunately, a typhoon hit the island.’

As one may notice from the example above, this is another class of adverbs inJapanese that also involves mo. Although I will not propose an explicit analysisof evaluative adverbs in this paper, I will examine the semantic property ofevaluative adverbs and the semantic contribution of mo. In particular, I willshow that the idea that mo-attached adverbs are always located somewherehigher in the structure such as T′ is compatible with existing analyses onevaluative adverbs such as Sawada (1978) and Potts (2005). Before reviewingtheir analyses, let us briefly look at the overall semantic properties of evaluativeadverbs.

5.1 Semantic properties of evaluative adverbs

As I introduced in section 1, citing Ernst (2002), and also repeated below, eval-uative adverbs are not classified as subject-oriented adverbs but as a subtypeof speaker-oriented adverbs.

(35) a. Subject-oriented adverbs:(i) Agent-oriented adverbs (stupidly, cleverly, rudely, etc.)(ii) Mental attitude adverbs (reluctantly, calmly, willingly, etc.)

b. Speaker-oriented adverbs:(i) Speech-act adverbs (honestly, frankly, roughly, etc.)(ii) Epistemic adverbs (perhaps, probably, maybe, etc.)(iii) Evaluative adverbs (unbelievably, unfortunately, luckily, etc.)


Evaluative adverbs “represent the speaker’s evaluation of some state of affairsaccording to how good or bad it is (luckily, unfortunately), how (ab)normal itis (normally, strangely, curiously, surprisingly), its desirability (ideally, prefer-ably), or a wide range of other criteria (e.g., for significantly, absurdly, conve-niently, astonishingly, etc.)” (Ernst 2002: 76).

While many of the adverbs that are categorized as evaluative adverbs aremo attached adverbs, it is not the case that all of them are, e.g., ainiku(*-mo)‘unfortunately’, narubeku(*-mo) ‘preferably’, futsuuni(*-mo) ‘normally’. Ad-verbs that are not compatible with mo are those that are not morphologicallyderived from adjectives, as it is also the case with SS-oriented adverbs. For thepurpose of this section, I will focus on those that are derived from adjectivesand for which mo is obligatory.

Unlike the mo-attachment on SS-oriented adverbs, however, the mo-attachmenton evaluative adverbs is in some cases optional. Morimoto (1994) reports thatthere are three morphological types for evaluative and subject-oriented ad-verbs, with respect to the presence of mo.

(36) a. Not compatible with moainiku(∗-mo) ‘unfortunately’

b. Mo is optionalsaiwai(ni(-mo)) ‘fortunately’, kinodokuni(-mo) ‘poorly’,kanshinni(-mo) ‘impressively’, mezurashiku(-mo) ‘uncommonly’,unwaruku(-mo) ‘unluckily’

c. Mo is obligatoryfushigini-mo ‘mysteriously’, kannyooni-mo ‘generously’,zannenni-mo ‘unfortunately; sadly; to one’s regret/disappointment’,hinikuni-mo ‘ironically’, orokani-mo ‘stupidly’

According to Morimoto (1994), mo is obligatory for the adverbs that have acorresponding manner adverbial meaning, thus mo’s function is to distinguishevaluative adverbs from their corresponding manner adverbs. However, thisexplanation is not adequate as the following examples show.

(37) a. *John-waJohn-top

fushiginimysteriously

odotta.danced

Intended: ‘John danced mysteriously.’b. *John-wa

John-tophinikuniironically

hanashita.spoke

Intended: ‘John spoke ironically.’c. *John-wa

John-topzannenniunfortunately

koronda.tumble.over

Intended: ‘John tumble over in an unfortunate way.’

If Morimoto’s (1994) explanation is correct, the sentences above should begrammatical and all of them should represent manner meanings, because theyare the adverbs that are supposed to take mo obligatorily in their evaluativeuses as listed in (36-c). However, these examples are unacceptable, as Morimoto

24 Ai Kubota

(1994) notices herself, indicating that they cannot be used as manner adverbs,at least by just taking mo away. At the moment, I do not have an alternativeexplanation for the reason of mo-optionality with some evaluative adverbs.What is clear, though, is that the morphological process of mo-attachment foradverbs that are derived from adjectives is a phenomenon that is not limitedto SS-oriented adverbs but also commonly found in evaluative adverbs.

As the examples in (37) show, most evaluative adverbs in Japanese do nothave the manner adverbial meaning. Instead of being interpreted as manneradverbs, most of them typically appear as part of small clauses of some kindwith verbs such as omou ‘to think’, kanjiru ‘to feel’, and kikoeru ‘to be heard’.The -ni endings of the following adverbs indicate that they are categoricallyadverbs rather than adjectives, in which case they should take either the -na ending or a copular verb followed by a complementizer (e.g., fushigi-da-toomou ‘think that it is mysterious’).

(38) a. Kono-dekigoto-oThis-incident-acc

fushiginimysteriously

omou.think

‘I think this incident mysterious.’b. Kono-hanashi-wa

This-story-tophinikuniironically

omowareru.seem

‘This story seems ironic.’c. Kare-no

He-genfusanka-gaabsence-acc

zannenniunfortunately

kanjirareru.feel.can

‘I feel unfortunate of his absence.’

In English, on the other hand, many adverbs have both manner and evaluativemeanings such as oddly, appropriately, and luckily. The examples in (39) and(40) below are from Ernst (2002) and Potts (2005) respectively.

(39) a. Oddly, Carol was dancing. (Evaluative)b. Carol was dancing oddly. (Manner)

(40) a. Luckily, Willie won the pool tournament. (Evaluative)b. Willie won the pool tournament luckily. (Manner)

The difference between the two sentences in (39) is that “[i]n [(39-a)], on theone hand, there is a fact about an event of dancing by Carol that is odd;that is, it is odd that there is such an event, considering among other relevantfacts in context. The manner reading in [(39-b)], on the other hand, saysthat there is a (Spec)Event [i.e., specific event] of dancing by Carol, which isodd compared to other dancing events” (Ernst 2002: 76). Thus, the differencebetween the two meanings can be explained in terms of comparison classes.For evaluative adverbs, the comparison class consists of propositions (facts),whereas for manner adverbs, it consists of a specific kind of events as mentionedbefore (i.e., various kinds of dancing in the above example). Whether it canbe judged odd or not is determined by the relevant comparison class in thediscourse.


As Ernst’s (2002) description above indicates, it seems that evaluativeadverbs modify something clausal or propositional, whereas manner adverbsmodify VPs. The idea that evaluative adverbs modify something clausal orpropositional seems to be quite common among other researchers, althoughdetails may differ. In the following, I review a couple of analyses on evaluativeadverbs.

5.2 Sawada (1978)

Sawada (1978) uses various sentential operators to show that evaluative ad-verbs (along with other adverbs that he calls ‘sentential adverbs’) are not partof the propositional level (or what he calls the ‘propositional stratum’) butare included in a higher level (or the ‘attitudinal stratum’ in his words). Thisis based on the observation that sentential adverbials are not included in thescope of question (41-a), negation (41-b), imperative (41-c), and sententialpronominalization (41-d) (Quirk et al 1972, Schreiber 1971).

(41) a. *Does he fortunately know about it?b. Obviously, he doesn’t want us to help him.

(obviously > NEG, *NEG > obviously)c. *Country road, fortunately take me home.d. A: Clearly, Hitler was a madman.

B: That’s false. (That = ‘that Hitler was a mad man’)

Since the scope of question, negation, imperative and sentential pronominaliza-tion is supposed to be limited to the propositional level, sentential adverbials,which are argued to belong to a higher level, are not included in the scope ofsuch operators.

This seems to be true for SS-oriented adverbs and evaluative adverbs ingeneral. The examples (42)-(45) correspond to the pattern in (41).

(42) ?*{Orokani-mo/Fukooni-mo}{stupidly/unfortunately}

John-waJohn-top

odotta-no-desudanced-n-cop

ka?Q

‘Stupidly/Unfortunately, did John danced?’

(43) {Orokani-mo/Fukooni-mo}{stupidly/unfortunately}

John-waJohn-top

odora-nakatta.dance-neg.past

‘Stupidly/Unfortunately, John didn’t dance.’(stupidly> NEG, *NEG > stupidly)

(44) *{Orokani-mo/Fukooni-mo}{stupidly/unfortunately}

odori-nasai.dance-imperative

‘Stupidly/Unfortunately, dance!’

(45) A: John-waJohn-top

{orokani-mo/fukooni-mo}{stupidly/unfortunately}

Mary-oMary-acc


‘Stupidly/Unfortunately, John hugged Mary.’

26 Ai Kubota

B: Sore-waThat-top

uso-dafalse-cop

yo.sfp

‘That’s false.’ (Sore = ‘that John hugged Mary’)

In contrast to SS-oriented adverbs and evaluative adverbs, mental attitudeadverbs and manner adverbs can be included in the scope of question, negation,imperative, and pronominalization, as shown in (46)-(49).

(46) {Iyaiya/orokani}{reluctantly/stupidly}

John-waJohn-top

odotta-no-desudanced-n-cop

ka?Q

‘Did John danced reluctantly/stupidly?’


John-waJohn-top

odora-nakatta.dance-neg.past

‘John didn’t dance reluctantly/stupidly.’(stupidly> NEG, NEG > stupidly)


odori-nasai.dance-imperative

‘Dance reluctantly/stupidly!’

(49) A: John-waJohn-top

{Iyaiya/orokani}{reluctantly/stupidly}

Mary-oMary-acc


‘John reluctantly/stupidly hugged Mary.’B: Sore-wa

That-topuso-dafalse-cop

yo.sfp

‘That’s false.’ (Sore = ‘that John reluctantly/stupidly huggedMary’)

This seems to suggest that mental attitude adverbs and manner adverbs inJapanese, unlike SS-oriented adverbs, belong to a propositional level. It isworth noting that the existence of mo coincides with the contrast above. Thatis, the adverbs with mo are external to the propositional level, whereas thosewithout mo are part of the propositional level. However, just from this obser-vation, it is not clear what semantic difference there is between the adverbswith mo and those without it, nor how to formalize the semantic contributionof mo.

As it was mentioned by one of the reviewers, the distinction between‘propositional stratum’ and ‘attitudinal stratum’ by Sawada (1978) is rem-iniscent of Potts’s (2005) idea of ‘at-issue meaning’ and ‘CI meaning’. In thenext subsection, I will turn to Potts’s (2005) analysis of evaluative adverbs.

5.3 Potts (2005)

Potts (2005) notices the importance of the comma intonation accompanied byevaluative adverbs. For example, the adverb luckily with the comma intonationas in (50) is interpreted as an evaluative adverb, whereas the one without thecomma intonation as in (51) is interpreted as a manner adverb.


(50) a. Luckily, Willie won the pool tournament.b. Willie, luckily, won the pool tournament.c. Willie won the pool tournament, luckily.

(51) a. Willie luckily won the pool tournament.b. Willie won the pool tournament luckily.

According to Potts (2005), evaluative adverbs (among other adverbs thathe calls ‘supplementary adverbs’) introduce multidimensional meanings bycontributing a CI proposition, but manner adverbs do not. He proposes theinterpretation of the adverb luckily as follows. It shows that the adverb luckilyhas two possible extensional realizations.

(52) luckily {λfλx.lucky(f(x)) : 〈〈ea, ta〉, 〈ea, ta〉〉λp.lucky(p) : 〈ta, ta〉

Without the comma intonation, luckily only contributes an at-issue mean-ing. When the comma intonation is involved, the comma intonation (commabelow) converts the manner adverb luckily in (52) into an evaluative adverb.

(53) comma λP.P : 〈〈ta, ta〉, 〈ta, tc〉〉

Potts (2005) presents the following two analyses: the one with the manneradverb luckily (54), and the one with the evaluative adverb luckily (55).

(54) lucky(win(the(tournament))(willie)): ta

lucky : 〈ta, ta〉 win(the(tournament))(willie): ta

(55) (win(the(tournament))(willie)): ta

•comma(lucky)(win(the(tournament))(willie)):tc

comma(lucky): 〈ta, tc〉

lucky :〈ta, ta〉

win(the(tournament))(willie): ta

The only difference between the two structures above is whether there iscomma involved or not. In (54), the meaning is one-dimensional and thereis no CI meaning involved. In (55), on the other hand, the meaning is multidi-mensional: the at-issue meaning simply says that Willie won the tournament,and the CI-meaning says that it is lucky that Willie won the tournament.Importantly, comma is essentially an identity function (λP.P ) as shown in

28 Ai Kubota

(53). Therefore, the at-issue meaning in (54), and the CI-meaning in (55) arebasically the same.

Apparently, then, the only difference between the manner adverbial mean-ing and the clausal (evaluative) meaning is whether the adverbial meaning isincluded in the at-issue meaning, in which case it is interpreted as a manneradverb, or in the CI meaning, in which case it is interpreted as an evaluativeor clausal adverb. While the idea that manner adverbs and evaluative adverbsmake meaning contributions to different levels or dimensions of meaning canexplain some of the differences between the two classes of adverbs, this aloneis not enough for explaining other semantic differences between the two. Forexample, consider a case in which there are two adverbs, luckily and unluckily,one being a manner adverb and the other being an evaluative adverb. Thefollowing example is from Potts (2005) (although he does not give an explicitanalysis for it).

(56) Unluckily, Willie luckily won the pool tournament.

Following the derivations (54)-(55), the sentence should be analyzed as follows.

(57) lucky(win(the(tournament))(willie)): ta

•comma(unlucky)(lucky(win(the(tournament))(willie))):tc

comma(unlucky): 〈ta, tc〉

unlucky :〈ta, ta〉

lucky(win(the(tournament))(willie)): ta

The adverb luckily, which is a manner adverb in the given example, appears notonly in the at-issue meaning but also in the CI meaning, and the CI meaninghas both lucky and unlucky. This apparently is a contradiction, since comma isessentially an identity function (λP.P ) as in (53), which leads us to expect thatthe CI meaning is interpreted as something like ‘it is unlucky that it is luckythat Willie won the tournament’. In order to interpret the sentence correctly,we need the adverb luckily to be interpreted as a manner adverb and not as anevaluative adverb. However, it is not clear how lucky in the CI meaning of theexample (57) is to be interpreted as a manner adverb, whereas lucky in theCI meaning of the example (55) is interpreted as an evaluative adverb. Thisproblem arises because, as it is, Potts’s analysis does not take into account thedifference between manner meanings and evaluative meanings. In other words,in addition to the idea that manner adverbs and evaluative adverbs makemeaning contributions to different dimensions of meaning, it is also necessaryto consider subtler semantic difference between the two adverbs, such as thedifferent comparison classes involved as in the analysis I have proposed above.

Importantly, for Potts (2005), evaluative adverbs are derived from manneradverbs and what makes them evaluative adverbs is the existence of comma


(the comma intonation). Thus, from this perspective, Japanese mo can bethought of as a morpheme that converts manner adverbs into evaluative (orother CI contributing) adverbs. If so, it is interesting to see from a cross-linguistic perspective that, in one language, the conversion is marked withintonation, while in another language, there is a specific overt morpheme thatmarks the conversion. Furthermore, from a theoretical point of view, it isalso interesting to see if it is possible to explain how the comparison class isdetermined with the dimension difference. However, to adopt Potts’s (2005)analysis for Japanese evaluative adverbs, it is necessary to adjust the systemso that it can explain the fact that evaluative adverbs in Japanese do not havemanner adverbial meanings even without mo (see the examples in (37)).

5.4 Summary

In this section, I showed that the mo attachment on adverbs is not limited toSS-oriented adverbs but is also found in a subclass of speaker-oriented adverbs,namely evaluative adverbs. The upshot is that the presence of mo seems toindicate that the adverb is located higher in the structure compared to men-tal attitude adverbs which happen to be mo-less. Importantly, the proposedanalysis in section 3 does not force mo to transform the adverb strictly intoSS-oriented adverbs. Rather, it simply readjusts the comparison class of theadverb and let the adverb be located higher in the structure. This leaves roomfor extending the analysis further to deal with evaluative adverbs briefly dis-cussed in this section.

6 Conclusion

In this paper, I introduced the phenomenon of manner/clausal alternation withparticular adverbs in English and in Japanese. Among the previous analyses ofthis phenomenon in English (Ernst 2002, McConnell-Ginet 1982, Pinon 2010),none of them was readily adoptable for the Japanese data. Ernst’s (2002) anal-ysis, which derives manner meanings from clausal meanings, was not suitable,because in Japanese the clausal adverbs are morphologically complex (theyare the combination of manner adverbs and mo). McConnell-Ginet’s (1982)analysis, which assumes the abstract verb act that is responsible for agentiv-ity, was not suitable either, because clausal adverbs like orokani-mo ‘stupidly’are not strictly agent-oriented adverbs but rather surface-subject(SS)-orientedadverbs and furthermore can appear with apparently agent-less verbs such assinu ‘to die’. I proposed a compositional analysis that derives the SS-orientedmeaning from the combination of manner meaning and mo. In my analysis,mo has a semantic effect (i.e. readjusting the comparison class of the adverb)and a syntactic effect (i.e. forcing the adverb to be T′-adjoined). This proposalwas supported by the fact that SS-oriented adverbs in Japanese, unlike agent-oriented adverbs in English, do not have the agent-oriented reading in passives,

30 Ai Kubota

i.e., they are never passive sensitive. To further examine if this proposal is cor-rect, I looked at another class of adverbs, namely evaluative adverbs, whichalso involves the mo-attachment. I consulted two analyses, Sawada (1978)and Potts (2005), on the contrast between manner adverbs and evaluative ad-verbs, and concluded that the proposal about mo is not incompatible withthem, although their main idea that manner adverbs and evaluative adverbsmake meaning contributions to different levels or dimensions of meaning is notenough for explaining the semantic difference between the two adverbs.

This paper has three main contributions: (i) it captures parallel propertiesbetween adverbs and adjectives by adopting the notion of comparison class, (ii)it proposes a hybrid analysis of the previous studies (the notion of comparisonclass from Ernst 2002 and the idea of deriving clausal adverbs from manneradverbs in McConnell-Ginet 1982) so that it naturally explains a morphologi-cal fact in Japanese adverbs, and (iii) it accounts for the nature of SS-orientedadverbs in Japanese that look like agent-oriented adverbs in English, and alsoexplains the phenomenon of manner/clausal alternation that is observed withboth SS-oriented and agent-oriented adverbs. From a cross-linguistic perspec-tive, this paper sheds light on the uniformity and diversity of the classificationof adverbs across languages. For example, while there are some phenomenathat are cross-linguistically observed, such as manner/clausal alternation andpassive sensitivity, on the other hand, there are cross-linguistic differences:while the manner/clausal alternation involves morphological marking (mo) inJapanese, it is intonational marking (the comma intonation) in English. Fur-thermore, while clausal adverbs such as stupidly in English at first sight seemto have equivalent adverbs in Japanese (orokani-mo), it turns out that such ad-verbs in Japanese are strictly surface-subject-orietend unlike the correspondingadverbs in English. Since this paper focuses on the manner/clausal alterna-tion of agent/SS-oriented adverbs, extending the analysis to other classes ofadverbs (e.g., evaluative adverbs) is left for future research.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Thomas Ernst, Berit Gehrke, Yusuke Kubota,Marcin Morzycki, the audiences at the Workshop on Modification (with & without modi-fiers), and an NLLT reviewer for extensive and helpful comments and discussion.

References

Anderson C, Morzycki M (2014) Degrees as kinds. Natural Laguage and Lin-guistic Theory This volume

Dowty D (1979) Word Meaning and Montague Grammar – The Semanticsof Verbs and Times in Generative Semantics and in Mongague’s PTQ. D.Reidel Publishing Company

Ernst T (2002) The Syntax of Adjuncts. Cambridge University PressGehrke B (2014) Different ways to be passive. Natural Language and Linguistic

Theory This volume


Geuder W (2002) Oriented adverbs: issues in the lexical semantics of eventadverbs. PhD thesis, Universitat Tubingen

Jackendoff R (1972) Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar. MITPress

Kennedy C (1997) Projecting the adjective: The syntax and semantics of grad-ability and comparison. PhD thesis, UC Santa Cruz

Landman M, Morzycki M (2003) Event-kinds and the representation of man-ner. In: Antrim NM, Goodall G, Schulte-Nafeh M, Samiian V (eds) Proceed-ings of the Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL) 2002, CaliforniaState University, Fresno, vol 14, pp 136–147

McConnell-Ginet S (1982) Adverbs and ligical from: A linguistically realistictheory. Language 58(1):144–184

Morimoto J (1994) Hanashite no shukan o arawasu fukushi ni tusite [On Ad-verbs That Represent the Speaker’s Subjectivity]. Kuroshio, Tokyo

Partee B (1977) John is easy to please. In: Zampolli A (ed) Linguistic Struc-tures Processing, North-Holland Publishing, pp 281–312

Pinon C (2010) What to do with agent-oriented adverbs. hanoutPotts C (2005) The Logic of Conventional Implicature. Oxford University PressQuirk R, Greenbaum S, Leech G, Svartvik J (1972) A Grammar of Contem-

porary English. Longman Group United KingdomRawlins K (2008) Unifying ‘illegally’. In: Johannes Dolling THZ, Schafer M

(eds) Event Structures in Linguistic Form and Interpretation, Mouton deGruyter, pp 81–102

Sawada H (1978) Nichi-eego bunfukushi-rui no taishoo gengogaku-tekikenkyuu [A contrastive study of japanese and english sentence adverbials:From the viewpoint of speech act theory]. Gengo Kenkyu 74:1–36

Schreiber PA (1971) Some constraints on the formation of English sentenceadverbs. Linguistic Inquiry 2(1):83–101

von Stechow A (1984) Comparing semantic theories of comparison. Journal ofSemantics 3:1–77

Wyner AZ (1998) Subject-oriented adverbs are thematically dependent. In:Rothstein S (ed) Events in Grammar, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dor-drecht, pp , 333–348

Wyner AZ (2008) Towards flexible types with constraints for manner andfactive adverbs. In: McNally L, Kennedy C (eds) Adjectives and Adverbs:Syntax, Semantics, and Discourse, Oxford University Press

Documents

Transforming Manner Adverbs into Subject-Oriented Adverbs