Sentence Adverbs

Abstract

Faced with simple declarative sentences, and perhaps with their yes—no interrogative counterparts, it is easy tofeel the pull of and thus to sympathize with a theory of meaning like Dummett’s, given in terms of sentence-radicals and force-indicators. But turning to just slightly more complex sentences whose correct use is a matter of routine familiarity, even a brief survey reveals quite ordinary elements that do not fit the proposed scheme. A good test case is provided by the class of sentence adverbs. Recall that in his ‘Logic’ of 1897 Frege includes the word “unfortunately” among his list of expressions that have no effect on a thought or proposition. Nowhere does he give an argument for this; and others have contested this claim. In the first part of this section I will therefore defend Frege on this point. I will show how sentence adverbs refuse explanation in terms of truth-conditionality and fare even worse as candidates for a kind of utterance force. On the other hand, a closer look at a few basic varieties within this class will also reveal why neither Frege’s nor Dummett’s conceptions of Farbung is of any real help. Indeed, this examination of sentence adverbs raises serious doubts as to whether ‘unfortunately’ — and the vast majority of its sizeable family — has anything to do with tone.