The Development of Sentence Adverbs in English

Swan, Toril

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9582.1988.tb00782.x

Cited by 15 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…I submit that the change is due to a general trend toward greater lexical specialization, a trend which can also be noted in other languages and in other areas of the lexicon. For instance, Swan (1988) noted a strong and steady increase among sentence adverbs in modern English, whereas in Dutch the class of degree adverbs has increased significantly since the Middle Ages. In the same vein, Borst (1902) noted a geometrical increase in number and variety of intensifying adverbs in the history of English.…”

Section: Conclusion and Speculationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Polarity-sensitive scalar particles in early modern and present-day Dutch

Hoeksema¹

2002

BJL

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In this paper, two simultaneous developments in a small area of the Dutch particle lexicon are charted and related to one another: (a) the gradual emerge of particle clusters with the semantics of "even" in polarity-sensitive contexts, and (b) the growing specialization among Dutch particles which mark scalar endpoints. The particular ways in which Dutch particles and particle clusters become more specialized are discussed and an argument is provided that this growing specialization extends far beyond the small domain studied here, and is the driving force behind the development of particle clusters.

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Section: Conclusion and Speculationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Polarity-sensitive scalar particles in early modern and present-day Dutch

Hoeksema¹

2002

BJL

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“…Diachronically, there has been a remarkable expansion in the English adverb class, notably with the gradual development and increasing productivity of the sentence adverb. As documented by Swan (1988aSwan ( , 1988bSwan ( , 1991Swan ( , 1997, the small set of Old English epistemic-modal 'truthfully' adverbs expanded in Middle English with more types and increased token frequency. It was not until Early Modern English that a similar increase occurred in evaluative sentence adverbs of the type illustrated in (1d) below.…”

Section: Adverbialization Of Speaker Stancementioning

confidence: 84%

Speaker stance and evaluative -ly adverbs in the Modern English period

Lewis

2020

Language Sciences

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Present-day English makes major use of adverbs for the expression of speaker stance, following what has been described as the adverbialization of speaker attitude. Two adverbial constructions have particular stance-expressing functions: those with an adverb that modifies a clause or sentence (SAdv) and those with an adverb that modifies an adjective phrase (AdjAdv). The emergence of modal and evaluative SAdvs from verb-phrase-modifying adverbs (VPAdvs) via inferencing and scope expansion has been well documented. There is a large literature on the diachronic development of present-day English intensifiers such as absolutely or really. Much less attention has been paid to the evaluative function of many AdjAdvs. This paper focuses on the relationship between extra-clausal stance -ly adverbs of the SAdv construction and their intraclausal counterparts of the AdjAdv construction. It is argued that -ly adverbial modification of adjectives cannot be reduced to intensification. It has become a favoured site for the expression of speaker evaluation, contributing to increase in information compression. The evaluative AdjAdv and SAdv constructions are seen to share a semantic schema, and by hypothesis belong to a single more abstract constructional schema. While earlier types appear to have evolved from circumstance adverbs, later types may have been coined by analogy in a cycle of increasing productivity.

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“…At this stage of English we do not yet find many instances of (low) probability adverbs (cf. Goossens 1982;Swan 1988aSwan , 1988bSwan , 1991Swan , 1996Palander-Colin 1999;Traugott 2006). González Álvarez (1996 claims that probability in Old English was "hardly ever expressed adverbially".…”

Section: Modal Sentential Adverbs In Old Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Grammaticalization of the Epistemic Adverb Perhaps in Late Middle and Early Modern English

Molencki

2021

Studia Anglica Posnaniensia

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Old and Early Middle English did not yet have modal sentential adverbs of low probability. Old Norse did not have such words, either. From the 13th century onwards first epistemic prepositional phrases of Anglo-Norman origin functioning as modal adverbials consisting of the preposition per/par and nouns such as adventure, case, chance were borrowed into Middle English. In the late 15th century an analogous hybrid form per-hap(s), the combination of the Old French preposition per/par ‘by, through’ and the Old Norse noun hap(p) ‘chance’, both singular and plural, was coined according to the same pattern and was gradually grammaticalized as a univerbated modal sentence adverb in Early Modern English. The Norse root happ- was the source of some other new (Late) Middle English words which had no cognate equivalents in the source language: the adjective happy with its derivatives happily, happiness, etc. and the verb happen. Together with another new Late Middle English formation may-be, a calque of French peutêtre, perhaps superseded the competing forms mayhap, (modal) happily, percase, peradventure, perchance, prepositional phrases with the noun hap and, finally, per-hap itself in Early Modern English after two centuries of lexical layering or multiple synonymy. The history of perhaps is a clear example of grammaticalization, whereby a prepositional phrase became a modal adverb now also used as a discourse marker. We find here all the typical features of the process: phonetic attrition, decategorization, univerbation, and obligatorification.

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The Development of Sentence Adverbs in English

Abstract: The paper attempts to map the development of sentence adverbs in English, and to show that our modern sentence adverbs have evolved from earlier intensifiers or manner adverbs.

Cited by 15 publications

References 6 publications

Polarity-sensitive scalar particles in early modern and present-day Dutch

Polarity-sensitive scalar particles in early modern and present-day Dutch

Speaker stance and evaluative -ly adverbs in the Modern English period

The Grammaticalization of the Epistemic Adverb Perhaps in Late Middle and Early Modern English

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