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. Part 1 introduced the category of evaluative adverbs and examined cases of semantic ambiguity inherent in sentences featuring them, discussing their syntactic-semantic representations and corresponding prosodic and information structures. Part 2 begins, in Section 1, by demonstrating the prevalence of the phenomenon under discussion through selected corpus examples. It also discusses, on the one hand, the most characteristic syntactic and lexical markers indicating particular readings, and on the other, the issue of potential ambiguity in sentences with the same word order and prosodic pattern. Finally, in Section 3, the article addresses the question of the lexical status of the expressions under study that can occupy different syntactic positions, and compares the approach advocated here with views expressed in the relevant literature.