When I was talking about sentential hopefully, I said that hopefully meaning “in a hopeful manner” had pretty much fallen out of my idiolect. It turns out I was wrong. I would definitely say this headline, “Obama Speaks Hopefully of Movement on Jobs Bill“, without a second thought, and without difficulty of interpretation.
The position of the adverb is crucial to the interpretation, though; if the sentence were “Obama hopefully speaks of movement on jobs bill”, I’d get the sentential meaning much more readily than the “full of hope” meaning. (If you’re a syntax nerd, the reason is that the position of hopefully in the sentence affects the dependency structure of the sentence, limiting what nodes hopefully can attach to.)
