The ‘adverb-ly adjective’ construction in English: meanings, distribution and discourse functions

We investigate a class of adjective phrases composed of a deadjectival adverb ending in -ly and an adjective head (e.g. staggeringly incompetent , absolutely terrific , fiscally responsible ), a compact construction whereby two adjectives may jointly contribute to evaluative meaning. Using corpus methodologies on more than 1 million examples and relying on semantic analyses of about 1,000 instances, we propose that the construction can be divided into different semantic subtypes, including Degree ( deeply disturbing ), Focus ( utterly ridiculous ), Manner ( delightfully performed ), Reaction ( strangely compelling ), Topical ( historically inaccurate ) and Epistemic ( intuitively obvious ), among others. Using this typology, we investigate the relative distribution of each subtype across several registers of written English. We found a high frequency of the Reaction subtype in book, film and art reviews, and we suggest a discourse-functional explanation for this, linked to the perceived value of originality in expressive writing. This investigation reveals the power of semantically informed, corpus methodologies to shed light on the distribution of specific constructions.