Lexical semantics and pragmatics of evaluative adverbs ∗ Olivier Bonami Université Paris-Sorbonne & Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle Danièle Godard Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle (CNRS & Université Paris 7) Version 2—September, 2006 1 Introduction Evaluative adverbs, such as unfortunately, strangely, curiously form a small but inter- esting class of adverbs. We aim here at proposing a precise account of their lexical se- mantic and pragmatic properties, using French as our object language. We argue that many peculiar properties of these adverbs follow from their special pragmatic status rather than their semantic type. It is generally recognized that the content of an evalu- ative is not part of the ‘main sentential content’ (Bartsch, 1976; ?; Bach, 1999; Jayez and Rossari, 2004; Potts, 2005). We propose that their behavior calls for an explicit mod- elling of their pragmatic behavior in a model of dialogue. In the case of simple asser- tion, the speaker asserting p without an evaluative commits himself to the truth of p , at the same time as he asks the addressee(s) to evaluate p ; when he asserts evaluative p , the same conversational moves are present, but, in addition, the speaker commits himself to the proposition associated with the adverb while withdrawing it from the addressee’s evaluation. In section 2 we show that attempts to relate the semantic properties of evaluatives to the type of their argument do not lead to satisfactory analyses; we carry on in sec- tion 3 by showing how the semantics of evaluative adverbs relates to that of the cor- responding adjectives, and clarify along the way the relation of evaluative adverbs to presuppositions. Section 4 contains the core of our proposal. Adopting a version of Ginzburg (2004)’s semantics for dialogue, we take evaluatives to provide an ancillary ∗ Aspects of this work have been presented at the Second ‘Journées sémantiques et modélisation’ (Lyon, 2003), at the GDR2521 workshop on dialogue (March, 2004), and at the workshop on the seman- tics of adjectives and adverbs (Barcelona, 2005). We thank for their comments and suggestions the au- diences at these events, and in particular Claire Beyssade, Francis Corblin, Jonathan Ginzburg, Jacques Jayez, Chris Kennedy, Jean-Marie Marandin, Louise McNally, Adam Wyner, as well as two anonymous reviewers. 1