Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 36, Issue 2, 2013

The paper first presents a little-known language, Mokša, belonging to the Uralic family, and investigates adverbs as they were listed in the first linguistic description of Mokša published by Ahlquist in 1861. It is shown that originally all adverbial forms in Mokša were motivated and transparent derivatives of deictics, adjectives and nouns. There apparently did not exist primary adverbs, unanalyzable in the synchronic system of Proto-Mokša. The unanalyzable adverbs stem from recent borrowings taken from Russian and Turkic languages. This situation opens the way toward a kind of lexical utopia where there would exist no primary unanalyzable adverbial form in a language.

This study explores formal criteria for the classification of adverbs in French. Distributional analysis tests whether adverbs appear in particular morpho-syntactic contexts, including syntactic constructions. It analyses combinations of adverbs, and their relative order in particular syntactic contexts. Finally it tests whether using adverbs in these positions imposes prosodic restrictions. These criteria result in a classification which is compatible with those found in major studies on this topic.

This paper uses both a Predication Theory and syntactic-semantic analysis in an examination of the Italian Verb-Adverbial Particle Constructions (referred to as V-AdvPCs) of the idiomatic type such as buttare giù una lettera “to write down a letter” and mandare avanti un’azienda “to carry on a business”. I provided here — within the Lexicon-Grammar framework (Gross M., 1981, 1996, 1998; Elia, A. 2013) and Operator-Arguments Grammar (Harris Z., 1976, 1978, 1988) — a new reading of the predicative structure of Italian idiomatic V-AdvPCs arguing that they can be split into different syntactic types on the basis of two main issues: the predicative element of the constructions (the so-called ‘operator’ in Harris’s theory) and the pattern of variation which they exhibit. The descriptive study carried out here is based on a lexicon-grammar database of 300 idiomatic V-AdvPCs with N0 V AdvPart N1 sentence structure.

The main objective of this study is to provide criteria for the delimitation of lexicalized instrumental manner adverbs in Polish. The ADV(Instr) figés have to be distinguished from the typical instrumentally-marked phrases and the syntactic complements of the verb, both in idiomatic as in ordinary sentences, in which they appear also in the Instrumental case. Objects, instrumental adjuncts and lexicalized instrumental manner adverbs will overlap with the usual nomenclature of semantic roles : objects, tools and manners. We will examin the criteria for the distinction between these concepts.

This article focuses on the following question: does the only syntactic argument of an adverbial discourse connective correspond to its second semantic argument? We will see that this is not always the case, which is a problem for the syntax-semantics interface. This interface brings us to distinguish two classes of adverbial connectives we sketch the study of.

The French adverbial PP en X temps is often considered telicity test. The present paper address the question of its reliability : how can we be sure that a VP is telic as long as it is compatible with en X temps ? Corpus data investigated in the article provide evidence that the supposed telicity test often appears in clearly atelic contexts. Further investigation of the linguistic features of the PP under analysis in such contexts leads to the conclusion that there is no reason to rise the adverbial clause en X temps to the rank of telicity test.

The French manner adverb autrement, as indicated by its morphology, derives a representation of manner from another (autre = other) representation ; the latter may be retrieved either in a subordinate clause following the adverb (autrement que P) or in the context preceding autrement. In the latter case, studied here, an anaphor is performed, and this paper, based on a corpus study, shows how identifying the antecedent is guided by clues, ranging from the verb phrase where autrement occurs to the environing discourse structure. In some cases, those clues are so frequent that one can talk about ‘discourse strategies’ or even collocations. It is thus shown that the adverb’s interpretation obtains not so much from compositional semantics (even helped by context) than from the properties of the constructions where it occurs.

When Italian bene ‘good / well’ occurs with fare ‘do / make’, several constructs with remarkably different argument frames are involved. This paper deals with three of them: (a) Il latte fa bene ai bambini ‘Milk is good for children’; (b) Fa bene il suo lavoro ‘She does her job well’, and (c) Faresti bene a non dire niente ‘You would do well to say nothing about it’. We discuss dictionary discrepancies concerning the lexical category of bene in (a), which we take to be a noun predicate, and draw a distinction between the adverbial uses in (b) and (c).

This article studies the adverb ainsi in its twin functions of manner adverb modifying a given verb, and of sentence adverb — here a connective. This dual functioning is characteristic of a number of adverbs, and as with them, all the characteristic properties of each of these types are verified. In both cases, the basic meaning of ainsi is that of ‘conformity’ — conformity of a manner of doing or being with another manner of doing or being, and conformity of the content of an utterance with a previously evoked state of affairs. For each of these two uses, we study the particular order of words, on occasion in relation to their character, and show that manner adverb ainsi is unique within its category in setting itself apart from other adverbial form types allowing “subject inversion”.