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In this article, I try to demonstrate that the distribution of manner adverbs can be accounted for in the framework of a fine grained lexico-conceptual analysis. Manner adverbs are of two kinds : first, they can refer to inherent properties of verbal predicates, and in this case they are restricted to active predicates, since only active predicates have a complex internal structure, which is a condition for nouns as well as verbs to be qualified, by adjectives or manner adverbs ; second, they can refer to properties inherited by the predicate from its subject, if the subject bears an agentive or proto-agentive role. The fact that certain properties of the subject may be inherited by the predicate explain why certain stative verbs (verbs of sentiment, for instance) admit manner adverbs.