Adverbs, Events, and Other Things: Issues in the Semantics of Manner Adverbs

Description

"Adverbs, Events, and Other Things" treats issues in the semantics of manner adverbs. Part I takes up the Davidsonian claim that manner adverbs are predicates of events. The book investigates the subtle interplay of event individuation and various kinds of event modification and claims that manner adverbs play a core rôle in singling out both simple and complex events. Part II of the book is devoted to word order phenomena involving manner adverbs in German. Presenting a general theory of predication structure for German sentences, the author shows how the position of manner adverbs - in interplay with other factors - determines the division of an utterance into topic and comment. She thereby gives semantic evidence in favour of the claim that manner adverbs in German have a syntactic base position. Preface 1. Introduction 1.1. Manner Adverbs 1.2. The Operator Approach of Thomason and Stalnaker 1.3. The Narrow Operator Approach 1.4. The Event Based Approach 1.5. Appendix: Operators Are Not Essential 2. Ontology 2.1. Events and Sets of Times 2.2. Events as Spatio-Temporal Regions 2.3. Semantic Participants 2.4. Summary 3. Events and Their Names 3.1. Attribution 3.2. Evaluative Adverbs 3.3. Causation 4. Mereological Structure 4.1. Evidence in Favour of Complex Events 4.2. Persistent Event Structures 4.3. Non-boolean Conjunction 5. Scope 5.1. Modification of Big Events 5.2. Existential Closure, and Diesing’s Mapping Hypothesis 5.3. On Little and Big Events 6. Manner Adverbs and Word Order 6.1. Manner Adverbs and Indefinite NPs 6.2. Intonation and Normality 6.3. Focus, and the Interpretation of Indefinites 6.4. Adverbs of Degree of Perfection 6.5. Conclusion 7. Bibliography