Predicative Adverbs: Evidence from Polish

This squib argues that adverbs can act as primary predicates. In Polish, a relatively large class of adverbs are frequently used in predicative constructions when the subject of predication is an InfP (infinitival phrase) or a CP referring to abstract objects: event kinds or facts. This requirement of a purely verbal rather than nominal subject of predication is the main difference between predicative adverbs and predicative adjectives, explaining contrasts between their syntactic behavior in extraction and coordination. Predicative adverbs usually express attitudes toward event kinds or facts and often combine with dative experiencers; in the case of InfP subjects, dative experiencers obligatorily control the subject.


Introduction
It is commonly-even if usually tacitly-assumed that adverbs cannot act as primary predicates. Although it is not fully clear whether it is meant as a crosslinguistic generalization, an explicit statement to this effect may be found in a prominent monograph on predication (Rothstein 2001:129): "I assume that the absence of a predication relation is because adverbs are just not syntactic predicates. They never appear in a position in which they can be predicated of a syntactic argument; this is not because they must be predicated of events, since even if the argument denotes an event, it cannot have an adverb predi-1 This squib is almost exclusively based on authentic examples drawn from the National Corpus of Polish (NKJP; http://nkjp.pl; Przepiórkowski et al. 2011Przepiórkowski et al. , 2012. 2 While there are other constructions in Polish that might perhaps also be analyzed as involving predicative adverbs, in this squib we concentrate exclusively on constructions with verbal subjects. 3 For the sake of clarity, subjects of predication are marked with square brackets. 4 Verbal subjects in Polish predicative constructions are further discussed-and provided a syntactic analysis couched in Lexical Functional Grammar (Kaplan and Bresnan 1982, Dalrymple, Lowe, and Mycock 2019)in Patejuk and Przepiórkowski 2018. (6) Ciekawostka.˛jest, [że w akumulatorach jako paliwo curio.INS is.3SG that in batteries as fuel używany będzie alkohol]. used will alcohol 'It is an interesting fact that alcohol will be used as fuel in batteries. '  Polish is a relatively free word order language, and the typical (but not exclusive) word order in such constructions is "predicatecopula -verbal subject," perhaps due to the relative heaviness of such verbal (CP/InfP) subjects. In (6)-(7), the nominal predicate is in the instrumental case, just as in the usual predicative constructions with nominal subjects (see, e.g., Pisarkowa 1965 andPrzepiórkowski 1999). Similarly, in (8)-(9), the adjectival predicate is in the nominative, again mirroring the usual predicative constructions with nominal subjects. As shown in (10)-(11), the predicate may be a prepositional phrase, just as in the case of nominal subjects. Examples (6)- (11) show that all six possibilities-nominal/adjectival/prepositional predicate ‫ן‬ CP/InfP subject-are fully acceptable and attested. Note that, in all six examples, the copula occurs in the "default" third person singular neuter 5 form because the grammatical subject is not nomina-tive (it is not cased at all); this is an instance of so-called default agreement (Dziwirek 1990).
Such verbal subjects of predication may also occur in "small clause" constructions involving verbs such as uważać 'consider', where-unlike in (6)-(11)-they are grammatical objects rather than grammatical subjects. As expected, such subjects of predication in the object position become grammatical subjects in the passive voice (a by-phrase may also be used, as shown in (14)). In brief, it is uncontroversial that verbal (CP/InfP) constituents may act as subjects of predication-and often as grammatical subjects-in Polish predicative constructions.

Predicative Adverbs in Polish
It turns out that in such cases the predicate may often be expressed by an adverb. 6 For example: good.ADV is.3SG that feel respect 'It is good.ADV that they feel respect.' (NKJP) 6 The existence of predicative uses of adverbs has occasionally been pointed out in Polish linguistic literature, especially in Grzegorczykowa 1975: 32-36 Forms marked in (16)-(17) as ADV, while glossed here with English adjectives, are uncontroversial adverbs in Polish. Although they are morphologically related to corresponding adjectives-for example, dobrze.ADV dobry.ADJ.NOM.SG.M-they cannot be analyzed as adjectives: (a) they cannot be used adnominally (see (18)); (b) they can be used adverbally (see (19)); and (c) they are not syncretic with any forms in the inflectional paradigms of corresponding adjectives. 7 Constructions with adverbial predicates are analogous to those with typical-nominal, adjectival, and prepositional-predicates: in both, the copula may be dropped in present tense, as in (20)-(21); in both, other verbs that can combine with nonverbal predicates may be used (e.g., wydawać się 'seem', stać się 'become'), as in (22) When predicative adverbs are replaced with corresponding adjectives, the meaning normally remains the same; 8 compare the predicative constructions in (16)-(17) with those in (24) While it is a matter of debate which cases of unlike category coordination should be analyzed via ellipsis of sentential coordination (socalled conjunction reduction), it is generally assumed that the unlike category predicates are conjoined directly, within a single predicative position, by virtue of bearing the same predicative features (Sag et al. 1985) or predicative "supercategory" (Bruening and Al Khalaf 2020). Indeed, (26) has the same predicative meaning as the prototypically predicative (27), which involves a nominative gerundial subject instead of an InfP and an adjective in place of an adverb. having.NOM.SG.N at home stuffed grouse 'Having a stuffed grouse at home was in good taste and trendy.ADJ.'

Predicative Adverbs vs. Predicative Adjectives
As noted above, in the case of InfP and CP subjects, the same predicative meaning may be expressed by adverbial and adjectival predicates-compare again (16)-(17) with (24)-(25). While there is no systematic difference in meaning between the two constructions, there are some idiosyncratic lexical differences. For example, there is no adverb with the meaning corresponding to the main meaning of the adjective ważny 'important', 10 so only the adjective may be used (see (28)), and-conversely-it seems that only the adverb gØupio 'stupid, awkward' has the meaning 'awkward', so only the adverb can be used in the intended sense in (29) Third, as noted in footnote 8, when an InfP subject may occur either with an adverbial predicate or with an adjectival predicate, the adverbial version is much more frequent and often preferred. Thus, the adverbial version of (31) seems more natural than the attested adjectival version, and similarly for (17) vs. (25). No such acceptability contrast is observed with CP subjects, in which case adjectival predicates are often more frequent. These facts can be explained by postulating that adverbs subcategorize for strictly verbal subjects of predication, while adjectives take nominal(ized) subjects of predication. That is, whenever adjectives seem to combine with verbal subjects of predication, these apparently verbal subjects have an outer nominal layer. This explains the extraction facts in (32): on the assumption that the additional nominal layer results in an island constraint, nominalized InfPs occurring with adjectival predicates are barriers to extraction, while purely verbal InfPs occurring with adverbial predicates are not. Moreover, on the assumption that syntactically more complex structures are dispreferred to synonymous simpler structures, frequent preference for predicative adverbs is also explained (though it is not clear why this preference is only observed in the case of InfP-and not CP-subjects). This categorial difference in subcategorization properties of predicative adverbs and adjectives also explains the fact that-while unlike category coordination of predicates is robust in Polish (see, e.g., (26)- (27))adjectival and adverbial predicates cannot be coordinated; compare the ungrammatical (33) with the grammatical (17) and (25). 13 13 Given that PPs may predicate of either nominal or verbal constituents, prepositional predicates may coordinate with either adverbial predicates (which, by hypothesis, expect verbal subjects) or adjectival predicates (which, by hypothesis, expect nominal subjects); compare (26) and (27) This inability to coordinate adjectival and adverbial predicates is explained by conflicting expectations as to the actual categorial status of the shared InfP subject: predicative adverbs require an InfP, while predicative adjectives require a nominalized InfP. Finally, this analysis also explains the fact that when CPs are nominalized overtly, as in (30), they may combine with adjectival predicates, but not with adverbial predicates.
A potential problem for the proposed analysis is that InfPs cannot be nominalized overtly, whether the predicate is adverbial or adjectival (or in any other context); compare the grammatical (31)  While there is a tension between overt nominalization facts and the hypothesis about different subcategorization patterns of predicative adverbs and adjectives, the impossibility of overt nominalization of InfPs does not rule out covert nominalization-a hypothesis supported by extraction facts in (32) and the coordination puzzle in (33), which cannot be explained otherwise. The relevant facts can be modeled by stating that the overt nominalizer to 'it' subcategorizes for CPs, while the empty N head acting as the covert nominalizer subcategorizes for both CPs and InfPs.
In summary, adverbs may be used as primary predicates in Polish; they occur in typical predicative constructions, including copular constructions; and they express predicative meanings analogous to those expressed with adjectives. However, the subjects of predication of such adverbial predicates must be strictly verbal-InfP or CP-and, given the limited range of abstract objects that such verbal constituents may denote (events, facts, etc.), the range of predicative adverbs is much smaller than the range of predicative adjectives (which may also predicate of nominal subjects, which may refer to a wide range of abstract and physical entities). This is the issue to which we turn next.

Types of Predicative Adverbs in Polish
What kinds of adverbs may act as primary predicates? They do not seem to correspond directly to any of the classes postulated within classifications we are aware of (including those proposed in Cinque 1999, Ernst 2001, and Maienborn and Schäfer 2011. They might be S Q U I B S A N D D I S C U S S I O N preliminarily characterized as "evaluative" in a sense: 14 they describe perception of eventualities (events, states, processes;Bach 1986) or facts as positive or negative, either in general or in some specific respect. The following are among the most common predicative adverbs in the National Corpus of Polish: • Good/Bad in general: dobrze 'good', fajnie 'cool', pięknie 'beautiful' (used metaphorically), wspaniale 'wonderful'; źle 'bad', niedobrze 'not-good' • Evoking good/bad emotions: miØo 'nice', przyjemnie 'pleasant', zabawnie 'funny', ciekawie 'interesting'; przykro 'sorry', gØupio, niezręcznie 'awkward', smutno 'sad', straszno 'scary' tanio 'cheap'; zdrowo 'healthy', praktycznie 'practical', and others The complete list of such adverbs is much longer, and many of them occur in predicative constructions very frequently. For example, within the 300-million-token balanced subcorpus of the National Corpus of Polish, there are a few thousand occurrences of predicative trudno 'difficult', Øatwo 'easy', and dobrze 'good', and hundreds of occurrences of ciężko 'hard', miØo 'nice', przyjemnie 'pleasant', and others. Both the number of different adverbs that can be used predicatively and the frequency of such predicative uses demonstrate the productivity of the construction.
The observation that predicative adverbs often refer to subjective perception of facts or events (or event kinds; see below), rather than to their objective characteristics, is supported by minimal pairs such as the following: (35) Jan dobrze pØywaØ. Jan.NOM well.ADV swam.3SG.M 'Jan swam well.' (36) Janowi dobrze byØo [pØywać]. Jan.DAT well.ADV was.3SG.N swim.INF 'Jan enjoyed swimming.' While (35) means that Jan was a skillful swimmer (even though perhaps he did not like swimming), (36) may only mean that swimming felt good to Jan (even though perhaps he was a terrible swimmer).

Predicative Adverbs with Experiencers
Since predicative adverbs often-but perhaps not always (see, e.g., tanio 'cheap')-express subjective attitudes, it is not surprising that they often take an experiencer argument-a dative nominal phrase, as in the attested (20) and (37) While in (37) the experiencer is an argument of (bardzo) przyjemnie '(very) pleasant.ADV' only, in (38) the dative dependent of najtrudniej 'most difficult.ADV' is at the same time the subject of the infinitival phrase headed by uzyskać 'gain'; that is, the dative experiencer controls the subject of the infinitival subject of predication.
According to the criteria in Landau 2013:29, this is an instance of obligatory control: the dative experiencer and InfP are codependents (they are dependents of the predicative adverb) 16 and the controlled "PRO" (the subject of InfP) is interpreted as a bound variable, as evidenced for example by the exclusively sloppy readings under ellipsis in (39) 16 The experiencer is a dependent of the adverb rather than the copula since (a) its acceptability depends on the particular predicate, not on the copula, and (b) the absence of the copula does not affect the experiencer (see (20)); see also Patejuk andPrzepiórkowski 2018. Bondaruk andSzymanek (2007) also analyze the dative experiencer as a dependent of the adverb, albeit as its external argument. S Q U I B S A N D D I S C U S S I O N 'It was most difficult.ADV for Jan to ask for help, ͕for Marysia too / but not for Marysia͖.' Here, the elided clause may only be understood as 'It was most difficult for Marysia to ask for help' (and similarly for the negated version); it cannot be understood as 'Jan asking for help was most difficult for Marysia'.
While the issue of obligatory control into subject is controversial, it has been reported for languages as diverse as Balinese (Arka and Simpson 1998) and German (Stiebels 2007). Constructions with predicative adverbs, dative experiencers, and infinitival subjects provide another argument against a ban on control into subject.

Semantics of Predicative Adverbs
Let us consider the following constructed examples, with InfP and CP subjects of predication, the latter with a pro-dropped subject, here assumed to refer to Jan: Both examples seem to be saying that Jan experienced a certain event as nice. However, their meanings differ: the InfP version may only mean that he enjoyed swimming, while the CP version means that he considered it nice that he swam-perhaps because swimming was nice, or perhaps because he thus overcame his fear of water. Hence, only the CP version may be followed by something like ale samo pØywanie nie byØo takie miØe 'but the swimming itself was not so nice' without creating a direct contradiction.
Such considerations lead to the conclusion that predicative adverbs may predicate of two sorts of abstract objects: events (or their kinds; see below) expressed by InfPs or facts expressed by CPs. This conclusion is supported by the fact that while all of the adverbs listed in section 5 occur with InfP subjects, only some of them-mostly those expressing general or emotional attitude-may occur with CP subjects. Thus, both events and facts may be good, bad, nice, reasonable, and so on, but only events-not facts-may be easy, safe, healthy, and so on. Also, the textual frequency of predicative adverbs with CP subjects is a couple of orders of magnitude lower than with InfP subjects.
The preliminary conclusion that predicative adverbs occurring with InfP subjects refer to specific event tokens is incompatible with the following example: (41) Janowi trudno byØo [wstać]. Jan.DAT difficult.ADV was.3SG.N get up.INF.PFV 'It was difficult.ADV for Jan to get up.' The verb wstać 'get up' has perfective aspect, so it seems to refer to telic events. But (41) does not assert or presuppose that there was any particular getting-up-by-Jan event-(41) may describe a situation in which Jan did not even seriously start getting up. Rather, what was perceived by Jan as difficult was (instantiating) the getting-up-by-Jan telic event kind. Where InfP is interpreted as referring to particular events, it is because of the veridical entailments of the predicate: unlike trudno 'difficult', miØo 'nice' is veridical in this sense. 17 On the basis of these observations, and representing facts as true propositions, we propose the following partial meaning representations (leaving out tense, etc.) for the InfP and CP versions of (40): 18 These representations follow the neo-Davidsonian approach to event semantics (Davidson 1967, Castañeda 1967, Parsons 1990), in which particular thematic roles such as experiencer or agent are represented as separate functional predicates-for example, exp(s) ‫ס‬ j or ag(e) ‫ס‬ j. For concreteness, the predicative schema proposed in Rothstein 2001 is assumed here, on which the semantic representation of, for example, Jane is nice would be s. nice(s) ٙ arg(s) ‫ס‬ j (leaving out tense and aspect contributed by the copula); that is, the subject of predication is represented via the arg function from the predicate state s to the subject j. Such states s may host various semantic roles (Rothstein 2001:295), here the experiencer role. What is special about the constructions considered here is that the subjects of predication are not ordinary entities, but kinds of events (see, e.g., Gehrke 2019 and references therein) and facts. Again for concreteness, in (42) we adopt Chierchia's (1998:348-349) down operator പ , which shifts properties into corresponding kinds. In this case, it shifts the property (function from entities to truth values) of being a swimming-by-Jan event to the respective event kind (i.e., an entity). After existential closure over s, this representation leads to the proposition that this event kind is nice for Jan. 19 Similarly, understanding facts as true propositions and employing the standard intensional representation of propositions, (43) is saying subjects of predication are abstract objects-event kinds and facts-expressed by InfPs and CPs. This requirement of purely verbal rather than nominal(ized) subjects of predication is the main difference between predicative adverbs and predicative adjectives, explaining differences in their syntactic behavior with respect to extraction and coordination. Predicative adverbs usually express an attitude toward event kinds and facts and may often combine with dative experiencers; in the case of InfP subjects, the dative experiencer acts as an obligatory controller into the subject. Constructions with predicative adverbs are textually frequent and fully acceptable-they clearly belong to the "core" rather than the "periphery," if such a distinction is made.