Speaker stance and evaluative -ly adverbs in the Modern English period

Diana Lewis (1)

1 LPL - Laboratoire Parole et Langage

Present-day English makes major use of adverbs for the expression of speaker stance, following what has been described as the adverbialization of speaker attitude. Two adverbial constructions have particular stance-expressing functions: those with an adverb that modifies a clause or sentence (SAdv) and those with an adverb that modifies an adjective phrase (AdjAdv). The emergence of modal and evaluative SAdvs from verb-phrase-modifying adverbs (VPAdvs) via inferencing and scope expansion has been well documented. There is a large literature on the diachronic development of present-day English intensifiers such as absolutely or really. Much less attention has been paid to the evaluative function of many AdjAdvs. This paper focuses on the relationship between extra-clausal stance-ly adverbs of the SAdv construction and their intraclausal counterparts of the AdjAdv construction. It is argued that-ly adverbial modification of adjectives cannot be reduced to intensification. It has become a favoured site for the expression of speaker evaluation, contributing to increase in information compression. The evaluative AdjAdv and SAdv constructions are seen to share a semantic schema, and by hypothesis belong to a single more abstract constructional schema. While earlier types appear to have evolved from circumstance adverbs, later types may have been coined by analogy in a cycle of increasing productivity.

Mots clés: English; adverb; stance; grammaticalization; polysemy

Domaines: Linguistique

Diana Lewis. Speaker stance and evaluative -ly adverbs in the Modern English period. Language Sciences, 2020. ⟨hal-03106089⟩