On Semantic and Distributional Properties of Sentential Adverbs 论文

摘要

Abstract In recent linguistic literature, mention is often made of some logical forms1 that are supposed to represent the meanings of sentences, but rarely can we find explicit statements as to what kind of logical language is presupposed. Montague’s grammar is evidently one of the exceptions in this respect, but it covers only a small part of English and adverbs are not given much attention.2 Thomason and Stalnaker (1973) have presented a semantic theory of adverbs, but they have distinguished only two classes of adverbs: sentence adverbs and predicate adverbs. Their semantics is based on intensional logic; hence, propositions are conceived of as intensions of sentences, and singulary propositional functions as intensions of predicates. All sentence adverbs denote functions taking propositions into propositions, and all predicate adverbs denote functions taking singulary propositional functions into singulary propositional functions.