| This dissertation details an empirical study investigating the semantic properties of English manner adverbs and subject modifiers and the verbs they modify. The purpose of the study is to determine which of these semantic properties are relevant to manner adverb modification and to enable a comparison of those properties to the semantic properties relevant to the syntactic phenomenon of argument realization and to other semantic phenomena such as the temporal and aspectual properties of verbs. In order to make this comparison, it was necessary to systematize the data to determine which adverb and verb combinations were acceptable and which were unacceptable. This systematization of the data serves as the groundwork for a preliminary hierarchy of the types of semantic relations that play a role in adverbial modification. The hierarchy is expressed as a multiple inheritance hierarchy in which more specific types inherit information from more general supertypes. The semantic properties elucidated in this study are expressed in the formalism developed in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG; Pollard & Sag: 1987, 1994).; The comparison of this hierarchy to a hierarchy of semantic relations derived from semantic properties identified by Dowty (1989; 1991) and Davis (2001) as important to an adequate account of argument realization reveals a number of differences. Among those, two important distinctions are (1) the fact that, although some of the semantic properties relevant for argument realization also are identified as significant for describing the interactions of manner adverbs and verbs, the former are a small subset of the latter, and (2) the fact that semantic clashes between manner adverbs and verbs are much more easily overridden by contextual factors than is the linking of semantic role and argument. |
