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 21 singular)’). And in Turkish many manner adverbs are formed by reduplica- tion of adjectives: for example yavas. yavas. ‘slowly’ (cf. yavas. ‘slow’), derin derin ‘deeply’ (cf. derin ‘deep’), ‘ac ac bitterly’ (cf. ac ‘bitter’). There is also a cross-linguistic tendency for manner adverbs – or a subset of manner adverbs – to have certain phonological properties that distinguish them from other words. For example, in Hausa many adverbs are high-tone monosyllables of the form obstruent-vowel-obstruent – for example, kaf ‘com- pletely’, kas ‘specklessly’, kat ‘with a snapping sound’ – an otherwise rare pattern in this language. This phenomenon has received special attention in African linguistics, where the term ideophone has gained currency as the label for ‘a word, often onomatopoeic, which describes a predicate, qualificative or adverb in respect to manner, colour, sound, smell, action, state or intensity’ (Doke (1935:119)). But the phenomenon is, as noted by Courtenay (1976), by no means confined to African languages, and is attested, for example, in Australian languages as well. (Courtenay also notes that in some languages the peculiar phonological properties that distinguish ideophones from other words are not confined to adverbs. According to her analysis of Yoruba, for example, this language has ideophonic nouns, verbs, and adjectives, as well as adverbs. It seems, however, that while all adverbs in Yoruba are ideophonic, only relatively few nouns, verbs, and adjectives are.) Before turning to consider how adverbial meanings are expressed in lan- guages that lack a distinct open parts-of-speech class of adverbs, we should note that, even in languages with such a class, adverbial meanings are often expressible in other ways as well. In English, for example, phrases consisting of a preposition plus a noun or noun phrase can be used to express a wide range of adverbial meanings: time (at dawn), place (in school), direction (to church), manner (with ease), etc. And there are also expressions involving adjectives that paraphrase certain adverbs: for example it is unfortunate that (cf. unfortu- nately), in a careless manner (cf. carelessly). Not surprisingly, similar use is made of nouns and adjectives to express adverbial meanings in many languages in which there is no open adverbial class. (Some of the languages in question have a small, closed class of adverbs: others do not.) In Arabic, for example, according to Bateson (1967), many adverbial mean- ings are expressed by nouns or adjectives (which Bateson considers a sub- class of nouns) in the accusative case. Relevant examples are γ adan (next day: accusative) ‘tomorrow’ (cf. γ adu ‘next day’); yoman (day: accusative) ‘daily’ (cf. yom ‘day’); sari ε an (‘swift’ accusative) ‘swiftly’ (cf. sari ε ‘swift’). In Tagalog, which lacks distinctive manner adverbs, the meaning equivalent of such adverbs is regularly expressed by adjectives preceded by the marker nang: nang mabilis (marker ‘quick’) ‘quickly’; nang malakas (marker ‘loud’) ‘loudly’; nang bigla (marker ‘sudden’) ‘suddenly’; etc. There are also languages in which the meaning equivalent of a manner adverb is regularly expressed by an adjective without any special marking. One such language is Trique, in which, 22 Paul Schachter and Timothy Shopen according to Robert Longacre (personal communication), the class of adjectives simply does double duty, modifying verbs as well as nouns. In some languages, the meaning equivalent of certain adverbs is expressed by verbs. This is particularly common in the case of comparative and superlative degree adverbs (e.g. English more and most), whose equivalent in a good many languages is expressed by a verb meaning ‘surpass’, as in the following Hausa examples: (51) a. Ya fi ni hankali he.perf surpass me intelligence ‘He is more intelligent than I am’ b. Ya fi su duka hankali he.perf surpass them all intelligence ‘He is the most intelligent of them all’ (There are also, of course, languages in which the comparative and superlative are expressed by affixes on adjectives, as in English smarter, smartest.) Some other examples of verbs expressing adverbial meanings are to be found in the following sentences from Akan: (52) a. ɔ taa ba ha he.pursue come here ‘He often comes here’ b. Ohintaw k ɔ h ɔ he.hide go there ‘He goes there secretly’ The constructions in (52) are so-called serial verb constructions (see Schachter (1974) for some discussion). Finally, it may be noted that in heavily synthetic languages, it is common for a wide range of adverbial meanings to be expressible by verbal affixes. Eskimo, for example, has a large set of suffixes with adverbial meanings that can occur between a verb root and an inflectional suffix. A few examples of such suffixes are: -nirluk ‘badly’, -vluaq ‘properly’, -luinnaq ‘thoroughly’, - γ umaaq ‘in the future’, -kasik ‘unfortunately’, -qquuq ‘probably’. And a similar situation obtains in Yana, where there are verbal suffixes such as - ʔ ai ‘in the fire’, -xui ‘in(to) the water’, -sgin ‘early in the morning’, -ca (a), ‘at night’, -xkid ‘slowly’, and -ya(a)gal ‘quickly’ (from Sapir and Swadesh (1960)). Download 1.59 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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