Speaker-Oriented Adverbs of the German '-weise' Sort

Authors

  • Mingya Liu

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18148/sub/2009.v13i2.555

Abstract

Speaker-oriented adverbs (SpOAs) such as gl¨ucklicherweise ‘fortunately’ in German constitute a secondary proposition by predicating over the main proposition and a syntactically often silent argument ‘Beneficient’. Since SpOAs take wide scope, quantifying adverbs, whether negative or positive, may not precede them syntactically as otherwise they would compete for scope-taking over the rest of the sentence and this would cause a clash with the semantics of SpOAs. By uttering a sentence with a SpOA, the speaker performs two illocutionary acts, one assertive and the other expressive about the same propositional content p. The expressive speech act presupposes the assertive one, which is why any use of SpOAs presupposes the truth of p.

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Published

2019-07-25

How to Cite

Liu, M. (2019). Speaker-Oriented Adverbs of the German ’-weise’ Sort. Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung, 13(2), 333–347. https://doi.org/10.18148/sub/2009.v13i2.555