Oriented Adverbs and Object Experiencer Psych-Verbs

Non agentive’ object experiencer verbs (e.g. interest) as well as achievement verbs (e.g. find) are traditionally taken to be incompatible with oriented adverbs like cleverly. Research on large corpora disconfirms this claim. This paper accounts for the distribution of these ’weakly agentive’ verbs with dispositional adverbs (cleverly, patiently) and psychological adverbs (sadly, anxiously), focusing on French data. It provides a new typology of these adverbs and their different readings based on Ernst’s and Geuder’s ones, which accounts for the possibility for such adverbs to have pure manner or result readings. It shows that adverbs of this kind can coerce (i) ’non-agentive’ object experiencer psych-verbs like interest into causative (and agentive) predicates (He cleverly interested the investors in his product) and (ii) achievements like find into durative (and agentive) verbs (He patiently found the download link).