So the word clearly means “it is to be hoped,” although in certain restricted environments it can be used to mean “in a hopeful manner.” Hopefully, we can now put this “incorrect” nonsense to Ridger: I guess you’re suggesting that in this context, “hopefully” refers to some kind of stereotypical intonation and/or facial expression of “hopefulness”, something like “speaking quickly and with a quick rise in pitch, eyes wide and lips rounded”, to reflect the manner of utterance, assuming that’s how most speakers of English speak “hopefully”.

That’s right, people essentially never use hopefully to mean “in a hopeful manner” when they’re speaking their native language. Well, Mark Liberman over at the Log has run some numbers, and it turns out that while “subject-oriented” hopefully (i.e., meaning “in a hopeful manner”) is fairly common in fiction (almost always modifying descriptions of speaking, looking, and going: “Doug looked up at him hopefully”), elsewhere (in newspapers, magazines, academic writing, and speech) it occurs, on average, just 5% of the time, and if you restrict the search to spoken usage, the percentage is zero. I’m sure you’re all aware of the alleged incorrectness of sentence-adverbial (or “speaker-oriented”) hopefully (for a discussion of why apparently pointless decisions to chastise one sentence adverb and not another get made, see this LH post from last year).

Most hopefully meaning