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On Adverbs of (Space and) Time

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Studies in the Composition and Decomposition of Event Predicates

Part of the book series: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy ((SLAP,volume 93))

Abstract

This paper gives an account of adverbs such as “slowly” and “quickly” in a range of positions, focusing on their interaction with measure phrases in the comparative. To account for the unusual pattern of measure phrases, I arrive at a proposal with the following components: (i) such adverbs need to be treated as measure functions on events in a framework for gradable predicates, (ii) in combination with ‘non-quantized’ events, the measurement distributes over event structure, (iii) the distribution of types measure phrases follows from whether the measurement distributes or not, and consequently, from the aspectual properties of the modified phrase, and (iv) the notion of ‘manner’ involved in such adverbs emerges from distributivity. The analysis sheds new light on the notion of gradability across categories, and especially what it means for a modifier to contribute manner modification.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Another term sometimes used in the cartographic literature is “celerative” adverbs (Cinque 1999).

  2. 2.

    In general, I do not take “in an X manner” paraphrases to be a reliable diagnostic of actual manner readings; the distribution of this kind of adverbial does not closely match the distribution of the corresponding adverbs.

  3. 3.

    Note that “win” may also lead to achievement readings; these are blocked for reasons that will become clear, and aren’t relevant to the present point.

  4. 4.

    See Piñón 2000 for a similar claim about “gradually”.

  5. 5.

    Eszes (2009) phrases the claim quite strongly: “At first we might suppose that an analysis would be adequate which uses a scale structure with degrees ordered along the dimension of speed for the minimal parts (which may be considered separate bodily motions). However, this would result in an incorrect prediction, considering that the minimal parts make up the whole event, so that their speed values add up and determine the rate of the event, which means that on this supposition the rate reading would depend asymmetrically on the manner reading. Obviously, we have to make sure this does not happen.” This is far from obvious, for English at least, and the quoted claim seems to be based entirely on Tenny’s paraphrases. It actually seems to be correct that any rate-like paraphrase does depend on a manner paraphrase, and vice versa, as shown by the data below. In fact my proposal amounts to reducing the manner reading to a distributive rate reading.

  6. 6.

    The challenge, pointed out to me by an anonymous reviewer, is to ensure that the right comparison class is chosen when an event’s atoms could have multiple true descriptions, e.g. the parts of a slow run might be non-differentiable from the parts of a fast jog. It is clear that we cannot simply extract this information from the event argument to s, as a previous version of this proposal suggested. This problem is very similar to the case where a short basketball player might be tall for a linguist; again we need a comparison class independent of the individual being measured. The analysis of “slowly” and “quickly” developed in the following sections adds in the additional problem of distribution to atoms, which makes it even more difficult to extract meaningful information about what the comparison class should be from the event itself.

  7. 7.

    Intuitively, it seems plausible that “slowly” and “quickly” are further apart on the scale than mere reversal of order would suggest. We also would need to differentiate other adverbs such as “glacially”, etc. This is analogous to understanding the lexical differentiation of e.g. “hot” and “warm”. While formal semantic theories of degree modification have not focused on this kind of lexical difference, a natural solution has been developed in the computational semantics literature (Raskin and Nirenburg, 1996). This solution simply introduces an additional parameter into the lexical meaning, that allows adjusting the standard of comparison.

  8. 8.

    See Kennedy and Stanley 2009 for an analysis of a fairly different set of cases of “average” that involves averaging a series of measurements.

  9. 9.

    The distributivity operator applies straightforwardly to “more”, but forces us into some tricky assumptions. In particular, I will assume that a “than”-phrase with a distributive gradable predicate applying to the degree gap denotes the average degree for that distribution.

  10. 10.

    Can the homogeneity criterion and the comparison class be identified? It seems plausible that they could be, but I will not try to settle the issue now.

  11. 11.

    Substituting a “most”-type quantifier, to more closely parallel Cresswell’s analysis, would be straightforward.

  12. 12.

    A potential example is “*Alfonso slept quickly” (Katz, 2003); but here I think the problem may be lack of directed change rather than lack of atoms.

  13. 13.

    An alternative idea, along the lines of Schwarzschild 1996, would be to assume that the part-whole structure is not necessarily atomic, but that when it is not, we construct an atomic approximation using minimal covers.

  14. 14.

    See Torner 2003 for a similar proposal to explain the behavior of Spanish space/time adverbs in this type of context.

  15. 15.

    Though on a Cinque 1999/cartographic approach one might expect that apparent right-adjunction is accomplished via (possibly remnant) movement of VP past a higher attachment point for the adverb than is apparent from surface structure.

  16. 16.

    One extremely interesting case I will not deal with is noted by Shaer 1998; when these adverbs attach to questions or commands they have a different effect:

    1. (i)

      Quickly, talk to Alfonso.

    2. (ii)

      Quickly, what is the capital of Spain?

    What is measured here, apparently, is the time between the present speech event and the event that would occur if the command is obeyed, or the speech event that would be involved in answering the question. Similar effects happen with other types of high-attached adverbs in non-assertions, e.g. “frankly” (Isaacs and Potts, 2003).

  17. 17.

    I won’t take a stand here on how widely this approach can be applied, and it does seem like lexical derivation may be necessary for some adverb classes. For example, it is hard to give an account along these lines that directly relates the (ad-sentential) speaker-oriented and (ad-VP) non-speaker-oriented readings of adverbs like “frankly” (Potts, 2003; Ernst, 2009).

  18. 18.

    An alternative way of going about this would be to have adverbs of space and time simply measure an interval, and apply a type-shift in the case of manner modification. I don’t take this route here because it complicates the task of explaining the restriction to narrative discourse, but further research is clearly needed.

  19. 19.

    Except, of course, in complex discourse structures where they e.g. provide explanations or elaborations for part of a narrative sequence, as in:

    1. (i)

      Joanna walked into the room. Alfonso was asleep. She walked over to the bed.

  20. 20.

    Though we might expect some interaction with grammatical aspect, which is not consistently compatible with narrative discourse. But this is complicated by the interaction between what I have called narrative aspect, and other grammatical aspectual operators, which I will leave for the future.

  21. 21.

    One important type of measure phrase I will not deal with here is exemplified by “three times more slowly”.

  22. 22.

    We do get extent measure phrases with activities to the extent they can be treated as semelfactives (i.e. atomic). This can be seen in Krifka (1989) wine-drinking competition example, and extends to measure phrases modifying adverbs of space and time.

    1. (i)

      Ann drank wine in 0.43 s. (Krifka 1989 ex. 19)

    2. (ii)

      Ann drank wine 0.21 s more quickly than Joanna.

    Not all speakers accept wine-contest readings, but the judgment is always the same for (i) and (ii).

  23. 23.

    The observation that measure phrases with adverbs require comparatives has been lurking in the background of this paper for some time. But actually this isn’t an interesting property; it turns out that it is those adjectives that take measure phrases without the comparative that are unusual; see Schwarzschild 2006.

  24. 24.

    Fabienne Martin (p.c.) pointed out attested examples that suggest “gradually” does not entail “slowly”, such as (i):

    1. (i)

      About a week ago my car gradually, but quickly, lost a lot of its power.

    Speakers I have consulted did not find such examples entirely coherent, but it is unclear then why they should be as easy to find as they are.

  25. 25.

    Kristen Johannes (p.c.) constructed the following example, which speakers do tend to accept. Interestingly, speakers that find (i) grammatical still have trouble providing a coherent paraphrase. Erin Zaroukian (p.c.) also pointed out that “gradually” takes “two times”-style MPs, which I have been ignoring.

    1. (i)

      The temperature on Earth dropped two degrees per year more gradually than on Venus.

  26. 26.

    This is especially interesting given that it is far from clear that adjectives and corresponding adverbs in general have a synchronic relationship of this type (Geuder, 2000).

  27. 27.

    Example like “John is slow” on a non-metaphoric reading can perhaps be handled like “slow car”.

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Acknowledgements

For discussion of this and related work I am grateful to Judith Aissen, Boban Arsenijevic, Donka Farkas, Veerle van Geenhoven (especially), Berit Gehrke, Graham Katz, Jean-Pierre Koenig, Ruth Kramer, Chris Kennedy, Angelika Kratzer, Louise McNally, Anita Mittwoch, Marcin Morzycki, Florian Schwarz, and audiences at the subatomic event semantics workshop at UPF in March 2010, the UPenn IGERT summer undergraduate workshop in 2010, and the JHU semantics lab. I am especially grateful to Fabienne Martin and an anonymous reviewer for extensive written comments.

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    Kyle Rawlins

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    Boban Arsenijević

  2. , Dept. of Translation & Lang. Sciences, Pompeu Fabra University, c/Roc Boronat 138, Barcelona, 08018, Spain

    Berit Gehrke

  3. , UMR 8163 (STL), University of Lille 3, Rue du Barreau - BP 60149, Villeneuve d’Ascq Cedex, 59653, Nord, France

    Rafael Marín

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Rawlins, K. (2013). On Adverbs of (Space and) Time. In: Arsenijević, B., Gehrke, B., Marín, R. (eds) Studies in the Composition and Decomposition of Event Predicates. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 93. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5983-1_7

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