Overview

The book investigates the development of ‘speaker-oriented adverbs’ (SOAs) such as frankly, surprisingly, and apparently in standard written English. SOAs take propositional scope, i.e. they modify clauses or sentences. It is generally assumed that they have developed from historically prior narrow-scope adverbs, e.g. adverbs modifying VPs. There is, however, disagreement about the mechanisms that brought the change about. Based on quantitative data, the book tests various hypotheses involving reanalysis of potentially ambiguous narrow-scope adverbs (often referred to as grammaticalization), ellipsis, lexicalization, and analogy. The data provide no clear evidence in favour of any of the hypotheses tested but suggest that different mechanisms may have been at work for different lexemes and subsets of SOAs. The book should appeal to researchers interested in the development and licensing of SOAs, but also to those with an interest in diachronic and syntactic change in general, or in grammaticalization, reanalysis, or subjectification in particular.

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9789027219374

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Reviews

Despite the mixed results, this study stands out for several reasons. It is the first booklength study of subject-oriented adverbs in many years, and it contributes to the understanding and scholarship in the field. In addition, it is the largest empirical study of SOAs, with a significant number of tokens and adverbs studied. It offers important contributions to the field of generative syntax, with the focus on the Polarity Phrase as a phase boundary, and to the field of grammaticalization studies, with the comparison of reanalysis, lexicalization and analogy. This study provides researchers with a new starting point and new directions for future projects, and it is a welcome addition to the library of texts in diachronic, generative and corpus-based linguistics. -- James A. Berry, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, in English Language and Linguistics (2025).

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