On Manner: Presentation

An introduction to essays in a thematic issue of Langages titled "De la maniere" (On Manner) presents introductory summaries of all contributions & assesses their value in improving the characterization of the notion of manner at the levels of syntax, semantics, & lexicon; although the notion is fundamental to linguistic analysis, its very familiarity may conceal great conceptual fuzziness. If manner is an ontological category or a semantic primitive, linguists must still come to agreement on what is to be understood by the term & how it differs from means, instrument, qualification, or characterization before intelligent questions can be asked regarding the linguistic encoding of manner. Similarly heterogeneous is the category of circumstantial complements, which presumably include manner complements; the latter may also be treated as epithets of the verb, given the close link in some languages between adjectives & adverbs. In addition to syntactic structures, the encoding of manner is to be investigated in lexical semantics, as languages differ in the extent to which manner is incorporated as part of the meaning of certain classes of verbs; an equivalence is suggested between manner & sort as semantic components, respectively, of verbs & nouns. J. Hitchcock