Agentive Adjectives and Adverbs

This paper argues that "subject-oriented" uses of adverbs like stupidly (termed here "agentive adverbs") cannot be aligned with traditional classifications of modifiers, for they are neither predicates of events nor true propositional modifiers. On the basis of an analysis of the adjectival paraphrase of these adverbs, it is argued that agentive adjectives select facts, understood as contextualised events. The adjectival and adverbial variants do not differ in lexical meaning, but the factive requirement on the clausal argument of the adjectival variant triggers a parenthetical construction of the adverbial variant.