At the lexical level is an enumeration of manner adverbs related to verbs. At the action representation level, we have the ``manner'' or ``Effort-Shape'' (ES) parameters described below. To go from the lexical level to the action representation level, we would have procedures that operate on the (verb, adverb) pairs to translate them into manner-affecting ES parameters. One set of adverbs will modify the ES parameters directly, taking the default values from the stored nominal values. So an instruction to walk quickly would involve looking up the nominal walk speed and invoking a generic procedure ``quicker'' that scales the nominal rate by a factor of say 50% toward the maximum walking rate. This scaled rate can now be filled in the agent's current forward motion rate and used by the locomote action. A second class of adverbs could be interpreted as members of the first with some assumptions. For example, ``carefully'' can be interpreted as slowly and with low accelerations (something that can be consumed by the ES notation). In some cases, then, an adverb tells what movement pattern to apply to a (novel) situation. The patterns would be (pre-stored) action (fragments) that would be newly bound to the current object and agent. So these adverbs are interpreted by procedures that take the action as a parameter, substitute new object bindings, and then compose the spatiotemporal characteristics into the current action being done.
Manner specifications describe the way in which an agent carries out an
action. We define manner as composed of an Effort parameter and a Shape
parameter (see Figure 
). The Effort parameters, which
are derived from Effort Notation [BL80], express the quality
of a movement. Each parameter takes on a real value in the range from
-1 to 1. The Effort elements include Space, Weight, Time, and Flow.
Space varies from direct (1) to indirect (-1) and describes whether a
person is focusing in on his/her surrounding space or not. Weight
expresses the forcefulness of a movement at its end, ranging from light
(-1) to strong (1). The Time element describes the sense of urgency in
the beginning of movement along the continuum between sustained (low
acceleration) (-1) and sudden (high acceleration) (1). Flow describes
the progression of a movement and ranges between free
(dynamically-driven) (-1) and bound (kinematically-driven) (1). The
Shape specification describes the general shape and pose of the agent's
body, giving information on the directional goals of the agent. The
Shape parameters are specified for each plane -- vertical, lateral, and
sagittal -- as real values in the range [-1,1]. The vertical parameter
varies from sinking (-1) to rising (1), lateral varies from narrowing
(-1) to widening (1), and sagittal from retreating (-1) to advancing
(1).
Figure: The manner specification type