This papers argues that the apparent constraint of adverbials like 'for two hours' (or 'throughout the house') should not be viewed as a restriction to telic events or event predicates, but should be explained entirely in terms of the quantificational status of such adverials, acting as quantifiers over (contextually individuated) parts of a time interval (or spatial region).

In a forthcoming paper in this journal, entitled “Bad company objection to Joongol Kim’s adverbial theory of numbers”, Namjoong Kim presents an ingenious Russell-style paradox based on an analogue of Kim’s definition of the number 1, and argues that Kim’s theory needs to provide a criterion of demarcation between acceptable and unacceptable definitions of adverbial entities. This paper addresses this ‘bad company’ objection and some other related issues concerning Kim’s adverbial theory by clarifying the purposes and uses (...) of the formal framework of the theory. (shrink)

Adverbial modification is probably one of the least understood areas of linguistics. The essays in this volume all address the problem of how to give an analysis of adverbial modifiers within truth-conditional semantics. Chapters I-VI provide analyses of particular modifiers within a possible worlds framework, and were written between 1974 and 1981. Original publication details of these chapters may be found on p. vi. Of these, all but Chapter I make essential use of the idea that the time (...) reference involved in tensed sentences should be a time interval rather than a single instant. The final chapter (Chapter VII) was written especially for this volume and investigates the question of how the 'situation semantics' recently devised by Jon Barwise and John Perry, as a rival to possible-worlds semantics, might deal with adverbs. In addition I have included an appendix to Chapter III and an introduction which links all the chapters together. (shrink)

We investigate adverbial agreement in Sandəmarkesə (S. Marco in Lamis, Apulia) proposing phase-bound, local agreement relations, reducible to coordination, as in past and absolute participial constructions, suggesting a copulaless analysis where arguments are subjects in a small clause. With disjunct nominals with matching φ-features, the adverb agrees separately with each part in the set, otherwise resulting in ‘non-agreeing’ forms, which we test also with negative polarity items (niʃun-, ‘nobody’ and nentə, ‘nothing’). With fragment answers, the negation scopes over adverbs (...) agreeing with the two proposed topics: matching of the φ-features of both nouns values the negative operator with the same features. In fronted adverbs, agreement occurs when the question contains overt coordinated arguments, elements continuing a chain, and if coordinated arguments have matching φ-features. In agreement in topical contexts with fronted adverbs, agreement occurs with the aboutness-shift topic closely preceding them, rather than with the embedded direct object. (shrink)

This paper gives an analysis of the adverbial quantifiers exemplified in “I regretted it every time I had dinner with him.” Sentences of this kind display what I call a ‘matching effect’; they are true if every event in the denotation oftime I had dinner with him can be matched with an event regretting that dinner event. They are thus truth-conditionally equivalent to sentences of the form “There are at least as many As as Bs.” The difficulties of giving (...) a compositional interpretation to sentences of this form have been discussed in, e.g., Boolos 1981. I first show that the matching effect is semantic and not pragmatic. I then give an analysis of these sentences in a neo-Davidsonian framework, interpreting the adverbials as quantifiers over events. Syntactically they are analyzed as objects of a null preposition. This allows a simple compositional semantic interpretation in which the null preposition is interpreted exactly as other prepositions are by Davidson (1967), namely as denoting a function from the event argument of the matrix verb to the prepositional object. The matching effect then follows automatically. I extend the analysis to account for other sentences which directly instantiate the schema “For every A there is a B” and its equivalents, and show how the matching effect follows in general from the functional nature of thematic roles and prepositions. (shrink)

This paper investigates the semantics of adverbials like ‘page by page’ and ‘stone upon stone’. An analysis is developed in which sentences containing such adverbials have a pluractional semantics; that is, pluralization affects simultaneously the event- and the individual-argument slot of a predicate. Sternefeld's system of plural operators is used and extended for this purpose. The adverbial constrains the relation that is pluralized and makes visible a higher plural operator. In the case of ‘page by page’-type adverbials, this is (...) a fairly standard operator that leads to a simple divisional interpretation. In the case of ‘stone upon stone’-type adverbials, the operator has a stronger semantics that leads to a sequence interpretation. The generality of our theory permits straightforward extension to data like ‘she ran and ran’ and ‘she climbed higher and higher’, among others. Finally we propose that inclusive alternative ordering reciprocals have a pluractional sequence interpretation as well. (shrink)

The logical formalization of sentences containing adverbial modification, e.g., “John walks slowly”, remains demanding. According to Bennett (1988, 2002), as facts are exemplifications of properties, they are abstract and not basic items in the universe, whereas events constitute a special subcategory of facts. The names of facts are complete, but the names of events are incomplete. This paper aims to provide an alternative logical formalization of facts and events, reflecting Bennett’s metaphysical and semantic insights better than his formalization based (...) on Davidson (1967a, 1985) and Parsons (1990). After discussing Bennett’s theory, I will develop my logical formalization based on Clark’s (1970) predicate modifiers theories. Using the abstraction operator will allow different modifiers to have the same scope and simultaneously guarantee the unicity of the fact or event. There is no quantification over facts or events. The resulting formalization will have advantages in coping with verb dependent and nonstandard adverbs and allowing for easier conjunctive formalization. The semantic insight that the names of facts are complete describers, and the names of events are not will manifest in the distinct formalization of events. Multigrade predicates will enable further logical entailments. As a result, we get a formalization fitting into Bennett’s theory. (shrink)

This paper has two aims. First, it aims to provide an adverbial account of the idea of an intransitive self-consciousness and, second, it aims to argue in favor of this account. These aims both require a new framework that emerges from a critical review of Perry’s famous notion of the “unarticulated constituents” of propositional content. First, I aim to show that the idea of an intransitive self-consciousness can be phenomenologically described in an analogy with the adverbial theory of (...) perception. In an adverbial theory of perception, we do not see a blue sense-data, but we see something blue-ly, whereas in intransitive self-consciousness we are not conscious of ourselves when we undergo a conscious experience—instead, we experience something self-consciously. But what does this mean precisely? First, I take transitive self-consciousness to be the first-person operator that prefixes the content of any experience that the subject undergoes, regardless of whether or not the subject is self-referred. Further, I argue that this first-person adverbial way of entertaining a content of any experience in Perry’s revised framework fixes the subject as part of the circumstance of the evaluation of the content of her own experience. We can only evaluate whether the content is veridical of falsidical relative to the subject undergoing the experience. This is referred to here as “self-concernment without self-reference.” When I am absorbed reading a book, I do not self-represent my own experience of reading a book, let alone see myself as a constituent of the content of this experience. Even so, I experience that reading self-consciously in the precise sense that I do belong the circumstance of the evaluation of the selfless content of my experience of reading the book. The content of the experience of reading a book is simply a propositional function, true or false of myself. (shrink)

This paper explores an adverbial account of introspection that contrasts with both acquaintance and rationality theories of introspection. The bulk of the account consists of the following claim: for any subject S, mental state M, and object O, S introspects M if S is aware of O through M with a view to determining the character of M. This claim is fleshed out by drawing on considerations offered by early analytic British philosophers (namely: Alexander, Stout, Hicks).

Romane Clark has complained of the dissimilarity between Sellars’s treatment of conceptual thought and his treatment of sense impressions. For sense impressions are intrinsic to perceptions and, on Sellars’s view, both conceptual thought and perception are species of judgment. In the first section of this paper I want to raise a converse sort of complaint: Sellars offers an ‘adverbial’ theory of sense impressions and a similar account of conceptual thought. But this similarity of treatment is not justified by what (...) Sellars says in its defence. If the adverbial theory of conceptual thought is true, as I believe it is, then a number of consequences, important for the philosophy of action, follow. Sellars traces some of these in his paper “Metaphysics and the Concept of a Person.” It would be desirable, therefore, if the adverbial theory of conceptual thought could be made secure. This is attempted in the second section and, in conclusion, the power of the theory is exhibited by directing it briefly at a long-standing problem in the philosophy of logic. (shrink)

The last chapter shows the use of ‘or’ as an adverb. The discourse-adverbial view invites us rather to think of each clause as formulaically giving permission rather than asserting permissibility. Discourse adverbial uses of ‘or’ may be regarded as the most primitive uses. The invention of logic, or rather the many inventions of logic, for it has been invented many times, has always involved the suspension of some regularities governing the uses of ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’, ‘if, ‘possibly’, and (...) so on in favor of others. Traditional grammar and its late offspring represent one possible way of describing and representing discourse, howsoever fragmentarily. Our understanding of discourse ought to be measured, not in our understanding of that isolated path, but in the multiplicity of other possible paths that we are also capable of recognizing. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a novel interval-based approach to some well-known semantic puzzles related to aspect shift, in particular, to the interaction of for-adverbials with accomplishment and achievement verbs that take indefinite, bare plural, and mass noun complements. My approach is based on the insight that implicit frequentative aspect plays a central role in this interaction, a fact that was largely ignored in previous analyses. Specifically, I interpret frequentative aspect as an abstract verb-level pluractional operator that brings about aspect (...) shift and that is responsible for the distribution of subevent times and subevent participants over the event time of an atelic sentence. What Zucchi and White (2001) call "the aspectual effect of frequency adverbs" thus becomes the general rule for all frequentatively understood for-adverbial sentences. Linguistic support for silent verb-level frequentativity in English is drawn from overt frequentative aspect marking in West Greenlandic verbs. (shrink)

A fundamental assumption of Alexius Meinong's 1904 Theory of Objects is the act-content-object analysis of psychological experiences. I suggest that Meinong's theory need not be based on this analysis, but that an adverbial theory might suffice. I then defend the adverbial alternative against an objection raised by Roderick Chisholm, and conclude by presenting an apparently more serious objection based on a paradox discovered by Romane Clark.

This paper has two aims. First, it aims to provide an adverbial account of the idea of intransitive self-consciousness and second, it aims to argue in favor of this account. These aims both require a new framework that emerges from a critical review of Perry’s famous notion of the “unarticulated constituents” of propositional content (1986). First, I aim to show that the idea of intransitive self-consciousness can be phenomenologically described in an analogy with the adverbial theory of perception. (...) In an adverbial theory of perception, we do not see a blue sense-data, but we see something blue-ly, whereas in intransitive self-consciousness, we are not conscious of ourselves when we undergo a conscious experience—instead, we experience something self-consciously. But what does this mean precisely? First, I take intransitive self-consciousness to be the first-person operator that prefixes the content of any experience that the subject undergoes, regardless of whether or not the subject is self-referred. Further, I argue that this first-person adverbial way of entertaining the content of any experience in Perry’s revised framework fixes the subject as part of the circumstance of the evaluation of the content of her own experience. We can only evaluate whether the content is veridical or falsidical relative to the subject undergoing the experience. This is referred to here as “self-concernment without self-reference.” When I am absorbed in reading a book, I do not self-represent my own experience of reading a book, let alone see myself as a constituent of the content of this experience. Even so, I experience that reading self-consciously in the precise sense that I do belong to the circumstance of the evaluation of the selfless content of my experience of reading the book. The content of the experience of reading a book is simply a propositional function, true or false of myself. (shrink)

This paper develops an adverbial theory of consciousness. Adverbialism is described and endorsed and defended from its near rival, an identity thesis in which conscious mental states are those that the mental subject self-knows immediately that he or she is "in". The paper develops an account of globally supported self-ascription to embed this neo-Brentanian view of experiencing consciously within a more general account of the relation between consciousness and self-knowledge. Following O'Shaughnessy, person level consciousness is explained as a feature (...) of the bundle of mental capacities characteristic of persons: person level consciousness involves a capacity holism. Drawing on Kant, it is argued that if a person is in a mental state intentionally directed to an object then such a subject can "self token" such knowledge. The content of that self-knoweldge supervenes on the possession of a global set of capacities, and this capacity for self-ascription depends on the fact that our experience has a perspectival character with, as it were, nothing at the vanishing point of this perspective. The fact that one can attach the cogito to any one of one's representation shows a truth about the unity of the conscious life of a person that cannot be stated and this capacity is distinguished from self-conscious thinking about oneself. This approach is contrasted to Shoemaker's functionalist treatment of the self-tokening of conscious states and of "self-blindness". It is argued that to be fully consistent, Shoemaker has to abandon the claim that introspectionism is guilty of a self-scanning model or rational control as he seems committed to that model too. (shrink)

In a note on Aesch. Ag. 1243 f. in C.R. lxxv 187-8, I had occasion to cite a number of examples of adverbial transference. Whether they were or were not adequate to establish the point I was seeking to make I leave to the judgement of others, but the idiom possesses interest of its own, and it seems worth while to quote some further instances of it that I have noted since my article appeared. I will divide them according (...) as they occur with verbs of hearing or with other verbs. (shrink)

This paper is a reply to a reaction to our joint paper Measuring Duration in Dutch (1971).

What is the nature of lexical meanings such that they can both compose with others and also appear boundless? We investigate this question by examining the compositional properties of for-time adverbial as in “Ana jumped for an hour.” At issue is the source of the associated iterative reading which lacks overt morphophonological support, yet, the iteration is not disconnected from the lexical meanings in the sentence. This suggests an analysis whereby the iterative reading is the result of the interaction (...) between lexical meanings under a specific compositional configuration. We test the predictions of two competing accounts: Mismatch-and-Repair and Partition-Measure. They differ in their assumptions about lexical meanings: assumptions that have implications for the possible compositional mechanisms that each can invoke. Mismatch-and-Repair assumes that lexical meaning representations are discrete, separate from the conceptual system from which they originally emerged and brought into sentence meaning through syntactic composition. Partition-Measure assumes that lexical meanings are contextually salient conceptual structures substantially indistinguishable from the conceptual system that they inhabit. During comprehension, lexical meanings construe a conceptual representation, in parallel, morphosyntactic and morphophonological composition as determined by the lexical items involved in the sentence. Whereas both hypotheses capture the observed cost in the punctual predicate plus for-time adverbial composition (e.g., jump (vs. swim) for an hour), their predictions differ regarding iteration with durative predicates; for example, swim for a year (vs. for an hour). Mismatch-and-Repair predicts contrasting processing profiles and nonoverlapping activation patterns along punctuality differences. Partition-Measure predicts overlapping processing and cortical distribution profiles, along the presence of iterativity. Results from a self-paced reading and an functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies bear out the predictions of the Partition-Measure account, supporting a view of linguistic meaning composition in line with an architecture of language whereby combinatoriality and generativity are distributed, carried out in parallel across linguistic and nonlinguistic subsystems. (shrink)

This influence of accent has been taken as evidence that adverbial quantification is focus sensitive (cf. Rooth (1985)) or presupposition sensitive (cf. von Fintel (1994), Rooth (1995)). I will discuss a problem that has been identified by von Fintel and Rooth, the requantifiation problem. Roughly stated, standard accounts of indefinites as NPs that introduce new discourse referents are at odds with standard accounts of the focus sensitivity or presupposition sensitivity of (1), which force us to assume that indefinites may (...) pick up existing discourse referents and “requantify” over them. I will argue for a special class of indefinites that pick up existing discourse referents, which I will call non-novel indefinites, to explain the nature.. (shrink)

In this paper we present a study of adjectival/adverbial modification using modern type theories, i.e. type theories within the tradition of Martin-Löf. We present an account of various issues concerning adjectival/adverbial modification and argue that MTTs can be used as an adequate language for interpreting NL semantics. MTTs are not only expressive enough to deal with a range of modification phenomena, but are furthermore well-suited to perform reasoning tasks that can be easily implemented given their proof-theoretic nature. In (...) MTT-semantics, common nouns are interpreted as types rather than predicates. Therefore, in order to capture the semantics of adjectives adequately, one needs to meet the challenge of modeling CNs modified by adjectives as types. To explicate that this can be done successfully, we first look at the mainstream classification of adjectives, i.e. intersective, subsective and non-subsective adjectives. There, we show that the rich type structure available in MTTs, along with a suitable subtyping framework, offers an adequate mechanism to model these cases. In particular, this modelling naturally takes care of the characterising inferences associated with each class of adjectives. Then, more advanced issues on adjectival modification are discussed: degree adjectives, comparatives and multidimensional adjectives. There, it is shown that the use of indexed types can be usefully applied in order to deal with these cases. In the same vein, the issue of adverbial modification is discussed. We study two general typings for sentence and VP adverbs respectively. It is shown that the rich type structure in MTTs further provides useful organisational mechanisms in giving formal semantics for adverbs. In particular, we discuss the use of \-types to capture the veridicality/non-veridicality distinction and further discuss cases of intensional adverbs using the type theoretic notion of context. We also look at manner, subject and speech act adverbials and propose solutions using MTTs. Finally, we show that the current proof technology can help mechanically check the associated inferences. A number of our proposals concerning adjectival and adverbial modification have been formalised in the proof assistant Coq and many of the associated inference patterns are checked to be correctly captured. (shrink)

The paper presents a novel version of universalism—the thesis according to which there are only universals, no individuals—which is cashed out in terms of an adverbial analysis of predication. According to the theory, every spatiotemporal occurrence of a universal U can be expressed by a sentence which asserts the existence of U adverbially modified by the spatiotemporal region at which it exists. After some preliminary remarks on the interpretation of natural language, a formal semantics for the theory is first (...) provided, along with an intended interpretation of its key metaphysical imports. Follow some commentaries on the spatiotemporal manifold and determinable properties. (shrink)

This paper criticizes act-object accounts of experience and defends a version of the adverbial theory that is based on the assumption that sensory experiences always have propositional contents—in the sense that they do not represent bare individuals and properties, but whole states of affairs.

This book approaches depictive secondary predication from a crosslinguistic perspective. It maps out all the phenomena and brings together critical surveys and new contributions on their morphosyntactic and semantic properties"--Provided by publisher.

It seems generally agreed that a theory of sensory episodes that mentions sensory objects and a sensing relation — the ‘act-object’ theory — is unacceptable and should be replaced by some other account. A chief competitor is the Adverbial Theory, and one of its chief advocates is Wilfrid Sellars. While it is clear that there are serious difficulties for the act-object theory not facing the adverbial theory, I will argue that the latter has difficulties of its own.

El debate filosófico sobre la subjetividad moderna se ha centrado frecuentemente en la autorreflexión de los posicionamientos del sí mismo, y no se ha prestado suficiente atención a los modos discursivos de subjetivación, por ejemplo a marcadores de subjetividad como los adverbios. En este artículo se pretende establecer de qué manera los adverbios de modalidad expresan la gama de actitudes y los posicionamientos epistémicos del sujeto moderno hispanohablante. Se realizó un análisis de contenido de los usos idiomáticos entre 1500 y (...) 1950, tomando como muestra los contenidos del Corpus Diacrónico de la Real Academia Española, para establecer la frecuencia de empleo de los adverbios modales, evaluativos y evidenciales. Los resultados evidencian un incremento constante a partir del siglo XVIII en estos marcadores subjetivos de actitud, pero también permiten reconocer un tipo de subjetivación adverbial centrado en el aseguramiento epistémico, la naturalización de expectativas y ciertos desplazamientos en las evaluaciones personales. (shrink)

We intuitively make a distinction between _lying_ and _misleading_. On the explanation of this phenomenon favored here—the _adverbial_ account—the distinction tracks whether the content and its truth-committing force are literally conveyed. On an alternative _commitment_ account, the difference between lying and misleading is predicated instead on the strength of assertoric commitment. One lies when one presents with full assertoric commitment what one believes to be false; one merely misleads when one presents it without full assertoric commitment, by merely hinting or (...) otherwise implying it. Now, as predicted by the well-supported assumption that we can also assert with pictures, the lying/misleading distinction appears to intuitively show up there too. Here I’ll explain how the debate confronting the two accounts plays out both in general and in that case, aiming to provide support for the adverbial account. (shrink)

The traditional answer is: they must be atelic. But as we will see, this notion is imprecise. We will improve on it, without rejecting it. (Basically we’ll end up with temporally vs. spatially telic.).