Abstract
Adverbs of change like quickly or slowly are known to give rise to a number of interpretations. For example, Selena ran quickly says that the rate of running is high while Selena quickly noticed the plane implies that the distance between the event of noticing the plane and some previous event is short. Existing accounts (e.g., Cresswell in Formal semantics and pragmatics for natural languages. Reidel, pp 171–199, 1978; Rawlins in Studies in the composition and decomposition of event predicates. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 153–193, 2013) take rate readings as primary but struggle to derive additional interpretations. By contrast, I argue that adverbs of change measure the temporal distance between two salient events (or event parts) that are compositionally or contextually available. The main claim of the paper is that adverbs of change have a single if underspecified semantics and that the different interpretations arise through interaction with aspectual and discourse structure.
Many thanks to Hana Filip, Willie Geuder, Zsófia Gyarmathy, Graham Katz, Jessica Rett, Peter Sutton, and one anonymous reviewer. For English judgments, I am indebted to Curt Anderson, Kurt Erbach, and Peter Sutton. On a deeper level, this work owes a lot to Roger Schwarzschild for all he has taught me about adverbial modification, the theory of aspect, and event semantics. A previous version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of Semantics And Linguistic Theory 27 under the title “Adverbs of change, aspect, and underspecification”.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
I put aside degree achievement predicates like melt, freeze, widen, which express a change of state and can be telic or atelic (Dowty 1979; Hay et al. 1999; Kearns 2007; Kennedy and Levin 2008; Rothstein 2008) as well as semelfactive predicates like knock or cough, which refer to achievement-like events but can be iterated (Smith 1997; Rothstein 2008).
- 3.
Ignored here are Bach’s (1986) “culminations”, i.e., predicates like win the race or reach the summit, which have the properties of Vendler’s achievements but include preliminary stages.
- 4.
- 5.
But see Beavers (2013) for the assumption that only dynamic predicates are associated with what he calls a “scale of change”. Maienborn (2007: ft.4) calls predicates like sleep or wait stative, due to the fact that they have homogeneous reference. However, such predicates display the distributional properties of activity predicates, e.g., occur in the progressive in episodic present tense uses.
- 6.
It is possible that rate readings are available with some but not other accomplishment predicates.
- 7.
In order to ensure uniformity throughout this paper, I slightly adapt Cresswell’s original notation. In particular, I drop reference to possible worlds as nonessential.
- 8.
Alternatively, one could assume universal quantification over minimal subintervals and attribute the few exceptions to the specified condition to vagueness.
- 9.
If one tries to somehow exclude Jim’s walking when constructing the comparison class, we will produce the empty set and the average value cannot be computed.
- 10.
The sentence John walked quickly to the station is assumed to also have a rate reading (or a “manner” reading, in Cresswell’s terminology), attributed to a parsing whereby quickly modifies the verb alone. However, in view of the discussion in Sect. 2, I disregard rate readings with accomplishment predicates as dubious.
- 11.
To be fair, Cresswell does say that rate and duration readings arise with predicates of a “different logical kind” (p. 184). What he presumably has in mind is the distinction between activity and accomplishment predicates, respectively.
- 12.
This account also makes predictions about the distribution of measure phrases in sentences with adverbs of change. Here, I ignore this part of Rawlins’ account.
- 13.
I take the freedom of significantly simplifying these definitions. Importantly, the set of homogeneous atoms \(\mathbf {hatoms}(e, P)\) is generated from \(\mathbf {atoms}(e', P)\) and \(\mathbf {lat}(e', P)\), where \(e'\) is an immediate (but not necessarily proper) part of e. This is intended to capture the alleged duration (\(e' = e\)) versus rate (\(e' \sqsubset e\)) ambiguity of adverbs of change with accomplishment predicates.
- 14.
If, to the contrary, achievements are assumed to have a positive if very short duration, then there would be no reason why such events cannot be measured by adverbs of change.
- 15.
I once again ignore alleged rate readings with accomplishment predicates. If real, these can be derived if the set of homogeneous atoms is computed relative to the verb alone rather than the entire verb phrase.
- 16.
Since such transitions can occur inside composite events, this notion of a culmination is not a label for a specific eventuality type, in contrast to Bach’s (1986) “culmination” achievements.
- 17.
What is ignored here is that processes inside accomplishments can be dynamic (e.g., run the race) or non-dynamic (e.g., sleep until noon). This distinction is less relevant here because of the assumption, made in Sect. 3, that adverbs of change with accomplishment predicates lack rate readings. The semantics below will be set up in such a way that the underlying process in accomplishments cannot be accessed.
- 18.
Notice that the existence of a unique final segment presupposes an atomic domain of eventualities.
- 19.
It may seem unrealistic that the size of such atoms is fixed by the model once and for all, as different contexts may require different levels of granularity. We could thus relativize (39)–(40) to contexts c and require that only events of a minimum duration of \(i_c\) are considered. Schwarzschild (2015) offers an excellent discussion of potential restrictions on mereologically structured domains.
- 20.
For example, if John built three houses and noticed four planes, the \({\mathbf {atom}}\) function will produce three nonoverlapping events for John built a house and four nonoverlapping events for John noticed a plane.
- 21.
Similar examples were discussed in (23)–(25).
- 22.
Since a predicate of saying has the aspectual properties of achievements, here I make use of the simplified meaning for quickly stated in the paragraph that precedes the previous one.
- 23.
I do not fully agree with the specific claims made or the plausibility of the provided examples in the cited works, and thus I do not discuss these here. However, I do believe that the general observations pull in the right direction.
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Koev, T. (2019). Adverbs of Change. In: Altshuler, D., Rett, J. (eds) The Semantics of Plurals, Focus, Degrees, and Times. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04438-1_14
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