Subject-related -ly adverbs: the role of stativity in English adverbial formation. A synchronic and diachronic perspective

Abstract

In English, -ly suffixation of stative adjectival bases has been considered to be blocked since a dynamic interpretation of the resulting -ly adverb is not possible. However, this suffixation is different in subject-related -ly adverbs, i.e., subject-oriented adverbs that only retain the predicative meaning. Based on the analysis of 52,203 occurrences extracted by lemma from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and with the support of Old and Middle English data obtained from relevant historical dictionaries and corpora, this paper provides a synchronic and diachronic perspective and analysis of stative adjectival bases that allow -ly suffixation. Our qualitative and quantitative analysis establishes both relevant conditions, such as the semantic features -CONTROL and +TEMPORARY, and, conversely, irrelevant conditions, such as the syntactic structure of the verb phrase, for stative adjectival bases to take the suffix -ly. This type of derivational behaviour is thus shown to appear in a specific type of adjectival bases, namely uncontrollable temporal stative adjectives, which are more liable to be used in specific registers, i.e., fiction. In addition, these results provide new evidence for the classification of -ly adverbs within the adjective/adverb interface.