5. Adverbial (dis)ambiguities. Syntactic and prosodic features of ambiguous predicational adverbs

Abstract

Chapter 2 of this volume provides a comprehensive analysis that accounts for the placement of Hungarian adverbial adjuncts, deriving all of their word order possibilities, scope relations and prosody. In this paper I present novel data concerning the behavior of a narrower class of adverbs, so-called predicational sentence adverbs, discuss the role of prosody in relation to their syntactic and semantic properties, and propose an analysis that accounts for these additional facts as well. In the first part of the chapter, I concentrate on ambiguous predicational adverbs exhibiting both manner and clausal readings (e.g. szokatlanul ‘oddly’, okosan ‘cleverly’), and my aim is to show that their stress properties and prosodic integration can be derived from their syntactic position (determined by their semantically motivated selectional requirements) in the same way as in the case of ordinary adverbs. However, ambiguous adverbs, being semantically underspecified, have more than one possible sites to be adjoined to and their interpretation will depend on the structural level at which their adjunction takes place. In postverbal position, owing to the free word order and neutralized prosodic environment, the normal disambiguating strategies (see section 3.1) fail to function. The wide scope and sentential reading of an ambiguous adverb become available only by blocking the so-called ‘intonational phrase restructuring’ rule (the fusion of two intonational phrases), in other words, by preserving the intonational autonomy of the high adjoined adverb (3.4.3). In the second part of this chapter I show that a special type of ambiguity emerges within the sentence adverb class as well. There is a group of epistemic adverbs that shows two sets of distributional and stress properties, one of which can be attributed to a special function. Unlike canonical sentence adverbs, these epistemic adverbs (expressing conviction on behalf of the speaker) are linked exclusively to verum focus when they bear primary stress. In this usage they escape all the usual generalizations established for sentence adverbs: they can appear in questions, or in the scope of other operators, including negation. (In this sense, they behave more like pragmatic particles.) I propose to integrate this function with the model established for adjunct licensing by means of allo-