Domains for adverbs

Speaker oriented adverbs are argued to be excluded from downwards entailing envi-ronments, i.e. they are argued to be positive polarity items. This behavior is derived by analyzing them as domain shrinking possible world quantifiers (see Kadman and Landman [Ling. and Philos. 16 (1993) 353] on negative polarity and domain expansion). It is argued that this analysis derives the major distributional properties of these adverbs. Particular attention is given to the adverb possibly.