Transforming manner adverbs into subject-oriented adverbs: evidence from Japanese

Abstract

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