Integrating linguistic dimensions: a grammar for adverbs

On the one hand, it is well-known that adverbs raise interface problems, on the other, the architecture of HPSG is well suited for expressing the correlations between aspects of the different linguistic dimensions, treating them in a parallel fashion, and representing all of themwith feature structures. We will study the interaction of scoping with syntactic properties (grammatical function and position), with incidentality (prosodic property), and with parentheticality (illocutionary status). We represent scope properties as in Ginzburg and Sag (2000). Our target language is French. The semantic classes of adverbs are well-established cross-linguistically (Molinier and Levrier 2000, Bonami et al. 2004, for French ): connectives (donc ‘therefore’); speech act adverbs (franchement ‘frankly’); evaluatives (malheureusement ‘unfortunately’); modals (peut-être ‘perhaps’); sentential agentives (intelligemment ‘intelligently’ in Il a intelligemment refusé de répondre ‘He intelligently declined to answer’); frame (légalement ‘legally’); habituals (généralement ‘generally‘); frequency adverbs (souvent ‘often’); temporal localization (récemment ‘recently’); apsectuals (déjà ‘already’); manners (intelligemment ‘intelligently’ in Il a répondu intelligemment ‘He answered intelligently’); degree adverbs (beaucoup, ‘a lot’, intensément ‘intensely’); associative adverbs (seulement ‘only’). We leave aside connectives and associatives. Concerning the behavior that we call “incidentality” and “parentheticality”, the terminology is not so well established: most works on adverbs assume that there is a good correlation between the two, which is not at all what we observe. Incidental adverbs are set apart prosodically from the rest of the sentence while integrated adverbs are realized in the same way as usual nominal or prepositional complements. Parentheticality characterizes an illocutionary status: while nonparenthetical adverbs contribute to the content of the sentence that is taken into account by the speech act (it is part of the asserted content in a declarative clause), parentheticals are external to it, and constitute “commentaries”. Incidentality is a property of occurrences of adverbs, while parentheticality depends on lexical semantics. Consequently, most adverbs can have either an incidental or an integrated realization (1), while adverb classes are specified for their illocutionary status (we note incidental adverbs between ’–’).