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<Paper uid="C82-2061">
  <Title>ADVERBS AND SEMANTIC INFERENCES</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
ADVERBS AND SEMANTIC INFERENCES
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> 1. L. Karttunen (Karttunen 1970, 1971) demonstrated that  in English there exist six classes of predicates that differ as for the relationships holding between the predicate and its sentential complement: factives, positive and negative two-way implioatives, positive and negative one-way implicatives, and non-determlnatlves. H. 8ira (~im 1974) validated the classification for the Estonian lansuage. K &amp; ~ drew their evidence from verbs and adjectives. Now a question poses itself: do the * principles underlying their classification hold also for ~dverbs, and if yes, do they exhibit any differences in comparison with verbs and adjectives.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> According to Karttunen the relationship between the predicate and its sentential complement is determined by the se~antics of the predicate, and it can slwaye be computed if the semantic class of the predicate is known. Together with presuppositions semsntic inferences form a subclass of inferences with two distinct characteristics (Joshi, Weisohedel 1976), i) they are inferences that need to be made when analysing a sentence, i.e. the problem of when and where to make what kind of inferences does not arise in case of them i ii) they do not exhibit a &amp;quot;chain&amp;quot; reaction so characteristic of other kind of inferences the reason being that they stem from either the semantic structure of individual words or - 247 the particular synt.actic constructs of the sentence, and the relationships hold within the corresponding sentence.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The problem of making inferences has always been a &amp;quot;sore&amp;quot; point in natural language understandin6 systems. The mechanism of inferences discussed in this paper enables to reduce the amount, of computation needed and to make the interpretation of sentences more reliable.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3">  2. With respect to their influence on the relationship between the predicate and its sentential complement three classes of adverbs may be differentiated: manner adverbs, sentence adverbs and complement-oriented adverbs.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> 2.1. The behavior of manner adverbs (MA) and sentence adverbs (SA) in the sentence is widely different: i) NA presuppose the truth of. the embedded sentence without the correspondin6 MAz (1) John ~ ordered the boy to leave (2) John ordered the boy to leave Some SA (like &amp;quot;wisely&amp;quot;) have the same faculty, some (like &amp;quot;probably&amp;quot; do not: (3) Wis_~2~, John ordered the boy to leave (4) Probabl.y John ordered the boy to leave ii) MA are within the scope of the sentence negation while SA have the negation always within their scope: (5) John did not answer the question quickly (6) John answered the question (7) Shortly, John did not answer the question (8) John did not answer the question Thus it can be seen that MA always behave like factives, whereas each SA must have an entry specifying whether i% behaves like a fac~ive or like a non-determinative.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> - 248 2.2. Complement-oriented adverbs (COA) do not function only to mark the truth value of the compliment (Lehrer 1975) but also to change that truth value. If from the sentence (9) Bill accused John of stealing the oar it cannot be inferred whether John really did so or not, then from (10) it follows that he did so, and from (11) that he did not: (10) Bill ~ accused John of stealing the oar (11) Bill erroneously accused John of stealing the car  COA are mostly used with non-determinative predicates changin 8 the non-determined relationship into a determined one: COA like correctly and rightly function as positive one-way Impllcatlves presupposlng the truth of the complement, COA llke erroneously and wrongly behave as negative one-way impllcatlves presupposing the falsehood of the complement, It must be noticed that not always COA trigger the change of relationship: triggering depends on the semantic structure of the predicate (selection restrictions) and should be given for every predicate separately.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> 3. To wind up It must be said that adverbs do not possess all the. features characteristic of verbs and adjectives: they may function as faotlves (MA and some SA) or as positive or negative one-way impllcatlves (COA), and even as such their paradi@u is defective, e.g. as one-way Impllcatives they do not have any &amp;quot;neutral&amp;quot; form as the corresponding verbs and adjectives have.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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