Kyle Rawlins ( UC Santa Cruz )

A puzzling observation, first noted in Austin 1956, is that the syntactic position of an adverb can affect the meaning of a sentence. (1) a. Clumsily he trod on the snail. (Austin 1956) b. He trod on the snail clumsily. (2) a. Cleverly, John dropped his cup of coffee. (Jackendoff 1972) b. John dropped his cup of coffee cleverly. (3) a. Louisa rudely departed. (McConnell-Ginet 1982) b. Louisa departed rudely. In (2a), John was clever to drop his coffee when he did. In (2b) however, the way in which he dropped it was clever. Similarly, in (3a), it was rude of Louisa to depart when she did. In (3b), her timing may have been fine, but some aspect of her departure was rude. There are two ways that this pattern has been accounted for. The first, proposed in different ways by Thomason and Stalnaker 1973 and Cresswell 1977, explains the meaning differences in terms of scope. Adverbs in the sentence-initial position (which I will call high adverbs) compose with something other than what sentence-final (low) adverbs compose with. I will call this the scope approach. The second kind of approach proposes that adverbs have multiple lexical entries, related by a lexical rule. According to McConnell-Ginet 1982 the two uses of adverbs like rudely (3a-3b) involve different words of different syntactic category. Their meaning is connected by a lexical rule. I will call this the lexical approach. Recent work has tended to offer mixed approaches. Wyner 1994 suggests that rudely is ambiguous between a " whole-event " and a manner reading, where rudeness is predicated of maximal events and subevents respectively. Geuder 2000 puts the brunt of the work into the lexicon. Ernst 2002 presents a 2 Unifying Illegally mixed approach, appealing both to scope and lexical rules, that derives manner adverbs from sentence adverbs. The lexical and mixed approaches, while quite effective, are counter-intuitive-the different lexical entries behind a single surface form appear in complementary distribution. They are also too powerful-lexical rules of this kind can describe many meaning changes in adverbs that are never seen. This paper argues for the scope approach, and suggests that the meaning differences between the manner and clausal uses can be analyzed without resorting to a lexical rule or ambiguity. I present this argument through a case study of the adverb illegally. My proposal extends to a class of adverbs that have been traditionally …