Flexibility in adverbal modification : Reinterpretation as contextual enrichment

This paper is concerned with the fact that a number of adverbal modifications involve a reinterpretation of at least one of the expressions connected by the operation in question. It investigates the question of to what extent such meaning transfers can be viewed as emerging from operations of semantic coercion. Unlike other proposals, the paper offers an approach in which systematic reinterpretations turn out to be a result of contextual enrichments of an underspecified, yet strictly compositional, semantic representation of the given utterance. The approach proposed takes into account reinterpretations in both temporal and non-temporal modification. Moreover, it allows so-called secondary predications to be handled as a particular kind of adverbal modification. In addition, it opens up the possibility of also treating reinterpretations beyond those triggered by direct semantic conflict. The paper outlines a general formal framework of meaning variation that inter alia explains the semantic flexibility we observe in adverbal modification.