When I was talking about sentential hopefully, I said that hopefully meaning “in a hopeful manner” had pretty much fallen out of my idiolect. It turns out I was wrong. I would definitely say this headline, “Obama Speaks Hopefully of Movement on Jobs Bill“, without a second thought, and without difficulty of interpretation.
The position of the adverb is crucial to the interpretation, though; if the sentence were “Obama hopefully speaks of movement on jobs bill”, I’d get the sentential meaning much more readily than the “full of hope” meaning. (If you’re a syntax nerd, the reason is that the position of hopefully in the sentence affects the dependency structure of the sentence, limiting what nodes hopefully can attach to.)
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February 10, 2010 at 1:37 pm
Alex
There’s also punctuation/intonation: You can say “Obama speaks, hopefully, of movement on jobs bill”, with pauses on the ‘,’s, and it switches.
February 11, 2010 at 7:22 am
The Ridger
As with all adverbs, position in the sentence determines what it’s modifying.
Also, “in a hopeful manner” is almost entirely confined to verbs of speaking (not entirely – I found this nice example: By all accounts trickling north from Paysandu, Uruguay–where Copa America game results, I have heard, are stuffed into a bottle and tossed hopefully into the Uruguay River–Team USA has been kicking the absolute Copa out of the Americas in the world’s oldest international soccer tournament.) so it’s easier to read it in constructions like “speaks hopefully”.