This paper presents an analysis of one of the meanings of the French gérondif: the manner. On the basis of large data provided by monolingual as well as parallel corpora (FRANTEXT and InterCorp).
The author claims that the manner meaning is, in the case of the gérondif, derived from the basic meaning (accompanying circumstance) by two different procedures: on the one hand, a lexical procedure, specifying the inherent lexical aspect of the main predicate, and on the other hand, a pragmatic procedure, based on the contextual hypotheses concerning the emotional state of the agent.