Specification of methods and the semantics of method-oriented adverbs

Abstract

Method-oriented adverbs have received comparatively little attention in the semantic literature on adverbs. I shed light on their semantics. These adverbs relate an event from the lexical semantics of their underlying adjective to the matrix event, and do so in a way similar to that of instruments. I use independently motivated event structure decompositions to model the interaction of adverb and verb. This study broadens our understanding of the semantics of adverbs, and how adverbial modifiers interact with the event structure of the verbs they modify.