ADVERBS AND SEMANTIC INFERENCES 
Madis Saluveer 
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Tartu State University, 
78 Tii~ Street, 202400 Tartu, Estonia, USSR 
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 classific- 
ation for the Estonian lansuage. K & ~ 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 com- 
parison with verbs and adjectives. 
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 infer- 
ences with two distinct characteristics (Joshi, Weisohedel 
1976), 
i) they are inferences that need to be made when analys- 
ing 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 "chain" reaction so character- 
istic 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. 
The problem of making inferences has always been a "sore" 
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. 
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. 
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 "wisely") have the same faculty, some (like 
"probably" 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% be- 
haves like a fac~ive or like a non-determinative. 
- 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 chang- 
in 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. 
3. To wind up It must be said that adverbs do not poss- 
ess 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 "neutral" form as the corresponding 
verbs and adjectives have. 
References

Josh/ A.K. I Welsohedel R.M, Computation of a subclass of " 
inferences: presuppositions and entailment. TR N 74, 
Department of Information and Computer Science, Univer- 
sity of California at Irvine, 1976. 

Karttunen. L. The Lo~c of English Predicate Complemen~ 
Construction. Non-Publication 12 of the 1970 HSSB 
Mathematical Ltn~tisttcs Seminar. 

Karttunen L ! Implicative Verbs. Langu~et 1971, vol. 47, N 2. 
~ImH, 3emantlka. Tallinn, Val&~e, 1974. 
