hopefully as sentence adverb. If you use hopefully as a sentence adverb (as in Hopefully the measures will be adopted), be aware that many people find the usage unacceptable, including a large majority of the Usage Panel. It is not easy to explain why people dislike this use of hopefully. The use is justified by similar uses of many other adverbs: Mercifully, the play was brief. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. And though this use of hopefully may have been a vogue word when it first became frequent 30 years ago, it has long since lost any hint of jargon or pretentiousness for the general reader. The wide acceptance of the usage reflects popular recognition of its usefulness; there is no precise substitute. Someone who says Hopefully, the treaty will be ratified makes a hopeful prediction about the fate of the treaty, whereas someone who says I hope (or We hope or It is hoped) the treaty will be ratified expresses a bald statement about what is desired. Only the latter could be continued with a clause such as but it isn’t likely.
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continued objections against hopefully. You might expect that people would have warmed to hopefully once the usage became well established. But instead they appear to have become more adamant in their opposition. In the 1968 Usage Panel survey, 44 percent of the panel approved the usage, but this dropped to 27 percent in our 1986 survey. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the panel of the mid-1980s was less conservative than the panel of the 1960s, since it accepted once-condemned usages such as the employment of contact and host as verbs. And 60 percent of that same panel in the 1986 survey accepted the comparable use of mercifully in the sentence Mercifully, the game ended before the Giants could add another touchdown to the lopsided score. It is not the use of hopefully as a sentence adverb per se that bothers the panel. Rather, hopefully seems to have taken on a life of its own as a shibboleth.
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ambiguity of sentence adverbs. Like other sentence adverbs such as bluntly and happily, hopefully may occasionally be ambiguous. In the sentence Hopefully, the company has launched a new venture, you could construe the word hopefully as describing the point of view of either the speaker or the company. You can resolve such ambiguities either by repositioning the adverb (The company has launched the new venture hopefully) or by choosing a paraphrase (We hope that the company has launched the new venture). For more on sentence adverbs, see
adverbs, position of under Grammar.
