Genre and lexical distribution of subject-characterizing -ly adverbs

Abstract

Subject-orientation and subject-relatedness have been de!ned as properties of adverbs that have the ability to characterize the subject, the former simultaneously with the expression of adverbial meaning as circumstance. According to the de!nition of subject-related -ly adverbs as subject-oriented adverbs that can only characterize the subject, subject-relatedness would be expected to be dependent on subject-orientation, also because it is farthest from the prototypical function and meaning of -ly words and well into the prototypical function and meaning of adjectives. As this syntactic and semantic behavior is not signaled formally, it parallels, in principle, what happens in conversion, where syntactic transposition is without phonological change. Based on the evidence of "9,7%9 bigrams extracted by lemma from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, this paper analyzes the genre distribution of subject-oriented and subject-related -ly words, and their most relevant lexical features. The results show similarities and also di'erences in the behavior of subject-orientation and subject-relatedness as regards text genre distribution and in their formation from various types of adjectival bases. &e interpretations of these results are manifold, within and outside word-formation processes.