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An empirical investigation into the Adverbial Adjective and the Canonical Adverb Constructions of North American English based on Usage-Based Construction Grammar

Abstract

There are at least two distinct verbal modification constructions in Brazilian Portuguese: the Canonical Adverb Construction (CAC; for example, Pedro spoke quickly), and the Adverbial Adjective Construction (AAC; for example, Pedro spoke quick). Virgínio et al. (2021) defends the existence of a pragmatic-discursive difference between these two constructions; it is argued that AAC, but not CAC, requires that the verbal modifier be the most informative element (primary focus) of the utterance. In this work we verify whether this same restriction acts to reduce the productivity of AAC in North American English (for example: speak slow). To this end, an offline acceptability judgment experiment was developed with 28 native speakers of North American English who judged sentences with adverbial adjectives (AAs) and sentences with canonical adverbs in four conditions, based on a combination of frequency and focus. The results proved that there is a significant difference in the acceptability of utterances containing AAs in the primary and non-primary focus conditions (p = 0.003), supporting the hypothesis that the CAC of North American English is also sensitive to pragmatic-discursive factors. However, a significant effect of focus was found with canonical adverbs (p = 0.037). Despite this pragmatic-discursive similarity between the two types of verbal modifiers, the calculation of the intensity of the effect demonstrated a moderate effect of focus for AAs and a weak effect for canonical adverbs. In the article, a systematic proposal based on the experimental results is made to represent the constructional network of verbal modification in North American English.