The article examines the impact of word order and prosody on the meaning of constructions with evaluative adverbs in Polish. While Polish literature on adverbs often suggests that the position of adverbs “proper” carries no semantic significance, unlike that of metatextual particles (some of which are formally identical to them), there exists a specific subclass of adverbs that exhibit similar behaviour to particles in this regard. This subclass, known as subject-oriented adverbs, includes evaluative adverbs, which are the main focus of this analysis.
The article is divided into two parts. Following a brief introduction, Part 1, Section 2, discusses evaluative adverbs in comparison with other subject-oriented adverbs, outlining their shared semantic-syntactic properties. Section 3 focuses on the ambiguity of sentences containing evaluative expressions, which is influenced by word order and/or prosody. In line with structural semantics, the analysis seeks to identify a general mechanism underlying the observed interpretative differences, presenting basic syntactic-semantic formulas corresponding to these variants, along with related prosodic patterns and, consequently, information structure. These considerations lay the groundwork for Part 2, which will extend the analysis through a detailed examination of corpus data.
