Development of Speaker-Oriented Adverbs in English

The book investigates the development of ‘speaker-oriented adverbs’ (SOAs) such as frankly, surprisingly, and apparently in standard written English. SOAs take propositional scope, i.e. they modify clauses or sentences. It is generally assumed that they have developed from historically prior narrow-scope adverbs, e.g. adverbs modifying VPs. There is, however, disagreement about the mechanisms that...