Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Volume I: Clause Structure, Second edition
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Lgg Typology, Synt Description v. I - Clause structure
Parts-of-speech systems 19 as predicates. Consider the following examples: (45) ʔ i:pa-ˇc homi:-k (i ð u:m) man-subj tall-pres (aux) ‘The man is tall’ (46) ʔ i:pa-ˇc su:paw-k (i ð u:m) man-subj know-pres (aux) ‘The man knows’ As these examples illustrate, when used as predicates the adjectival stem homi: ‘tall’ and the stative verb stem su:paw ‘know’ take the same tense–aspect suf- fixes and optionally co-occur with the same auxiliary. (Non-stative verbs also take identical tense–aspect suffixes, but optionally co-occur with a different auxiliary.) Adjectivals are distinguishable from statives (and other verbs), how- ever, when they are used as modifiers. When verbs are used as modifiers, they must appear in a relativized form, which in the relevant cases involves a prefixed k w -, as in: (47) ʔ i:pa k w -su:paw-n y -ˇc iva:k man rel-know-dem-subj is. here ‘The man who knows is here’ (As the gloss indicates, the verb stem in this construction is followed by a demonstrative suffix and a case-marking suffix.) When adjectivals are used as attributive modifiers, on the other hand, the occurrence of the relativizing prefix is optional. Thus the following example is grammatical with or without the prefixed k w -: (48) ʔ i:pa (k w -) homi:-n y -ˇc iva:k man (rel-)tall-dem-subj is. here ‘The tall man is here’ Compare the ungrammatical: (49) * ʔ i:pa su:paw-n y -ˇc iva:k man know-dem-subj is. here In the case of such a language, one would probably wish to analyse words with adjectival meanings as a distinguishable subclass of verbs rather than as a distinct part of speech, but this is perhaps an arbitrary choice. 1.4 Adverbs Apart from nouns, verbs, and adjectives, there is one other open part-of-speech class that is attested in certain languages: the class of adverbs. The label adverb 20 Paul Schachter and Timothy Shopen is often applied to several different sets of words in a language, sets that do not necessarily have as much in common with one another, either notionally or grammatically, as, say, the subclasses of nouns or verbs that may occur in the language. For example, all of the italicized words of (50), which cover a considerable semantic and grammatical range, would ordinarily be identified as adverbs in a grammar of English: (50) Unfortunately, John walked home extremely slowly yesterday A question may thus be raised as to whether there is sufficient similarity among the various types of ‘adverbs’ that may be recognized in a language to jus- tify their being assigned to a single parts-of-speech class. We shall assume here that this question can, in general, be answered affirmatively, and that, for example, the italicized words of (50) can justifiably be assigned to a single parts- of-speech class, although they must obviously also be assigned to separate sub- classes. (The subclass designations for these words would be ‘sentence adverb’ (unfortunately), ‘directional adverb’ (home), ‘degree adverb’ (extremely), ‘manner adverb’ (slowly), and ‘time adverb’ (yesterday). Some subclasses of adverbs may be closed rather than open, but since the class as a whole is open, it seems convenient to deal with the entire class in the present section.) The usual functional definition of adverbs identifies them as modifiers of verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs (see, for example, Curme (1935)). In order to extend this definition so as to include sentence adverbs like unfortunately (which are in fact modifiers of entire sentences), and to allow for certain other possibilities (such as adverbs that modify entire verb phrases), we can say that adverbs function as modifiers of constituents other than nouns. The notional range of adverbs varies with the type of constituent modified. Sentence mod- ifiers, for example, commonly express the speaker’s attitude toward the event being spoken of; modifiers of verbs or verb phrases commonly express time, place, direction, manner, etc.; and modifiers of adjectives and adverbs com- monly express degree. Given the wide functional and notional range of adverbs, it is not surprising to find that there are no categorizations that are common to the entire class. In most cases, in fact, adverbs are not specified for any categories at all, although there are some exceptions. (Manner adverbs, for example, are sometimes specifiable for degree, as in John worked hard/harder/hardest.) Some cross-linguistic observations may be made about the morphology of certain classes of adverbs. In many languages, manner adverbs are derivable from adjectives by means of fairly productive processes of derivational mor- phology. Thus in French many manner adverbs – as well as sentence and degree adverbs – are formed by adding the suffix -ment to the feminine singular form of an adjective: for example lentement ‘slowly’ (cf. lente ‘slow (feminine singular)’), malheureusement ‘unfortunately’ (cf. malheureuse ‘unfortunate (feminine singular)’), activement ‘actively’ (cf. active ‘active (feminine |
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