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1a. Re: inflection and agreement of adverbs?
From: Alex Fink
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1a. Re: inflection and agreement of adverbs?
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Mon Apr 9, 2012 8:16 am ((PDT))
Double-barreled response.
Ian: thanks for the detailed answers to my questions on your adverb system!
Looks carefully crafted. The main thing that surprises me is this:
On Sun, 8 Apr 2012 16:54:35 -0500, Ian Spolarich <[email protected]> wrote:
>As far as how this distinction came about, originally, adverbs formed their
>own class of words that did not agree with the verb or noun in a clause. At
>some point, it became fashionable amongst the bourgeois of the time to make
>one's adverbs agree with one's verbs. While this would ordinarily lead to
>all adverbs agreeing with the verb, by this point, the adverb class had
>developed at least 2 genders and classes of its own, leading to a very
>irregular adoption to the new class. Thus, the bourgeois only adopted a
>select few classes of the adverbs into their new system, leaving the others
>to fend for themselves. As a reaction to this trend, some time later a
>philosopher argued that adverbs should be treated as adjectives and thus
>made to agree with the nouns in a clause. This lead to a wave of adverbs,
>especially those considered to be adjectival in nature, to be assimilated
>into this class. However, the linguists of the day were not entirely
>confident in what was and what wasn't an adverb, and they left the class of
>verb-agreement adverbs alone, leaving two rather distinct classes of
>adverbs.
This is an interesting course of development, and I don't think the
developments are impossible in and of themselves. But what _is_ strange
about it is that usually these kinds of changes, carrying forth from
pronouncements of scholars who have studied the grammar, or intentional
modification on the basis of such study, are among natural languages at best
a secondary force.
The processes that usually drive morphosyntactic change differ from your
sketch above in being non-intentional. A typical one is reanalysis of some
structure, that has e.g. perhaps arisen by glomming some formerly separate
words together, as a new kind of object. Roman's scenario is a good example
of this:
On Mon, 9 Apr 2012 08:13:41 -0400, Roman Rausch <[email protected]> wrote:
>What about such a scenario: At first there is adjective agreement, but there
>are no adverbs, quickness is a property of the subject. Then an adverbial
>marker appears and is agglutinated to the adjectives. It could be the word
>'now', for example:
>'dog-NOM quick-NOM now run-3.SG'
>> 'dog-NOM quick-NOM-ADV run-3.SG'
>With the proper devastating sound changes it could lead to a separate
>adverbial inflection pattern (season with salt and more adverbial markers
>for more devastation).
The quick-NOM-ADV here is a newly-emerged noun-agreeing adverb.
To propose a modification, this development wouldn't be a bad place to
deploy an oblique-case noun instead of "now", so long as you have (/ had)
Suffixaufnahme. For instance, the Romance adverbialiser developed from
"with an Adj mind", and there's no reason that mightn't work here:
dog-NOM quick-COM-NOM mind-COM-NOM run-3.SG
>dog-NOM quick-ADV.NOM run-3.SG
Roman wrote further:
>We have that kind of thing in English, in fact: Sensory state verbs take
>adjectives rather than adverbs: 'feel sick', 'taste weird'.
Why should they take adverbs? As I see it they're _depictive_ secondary
predicates, just like the "raw" in "he ate the meat raw", describing the
state of a participant during the activity described. As in that example,
English depictives are adjectives. Your case is a bit more confusing on
account of the middle voice, but to me the best interpretation of something
that "tastes weird(ly)" with "weird(ly)" construed as a manner adverb is
that the _manner_ of tasting it be weird -- say, if one tasted it by rubbing
it on one's back?
>I'm not sure
>whether 'shine bright' comes about because of the stative verb or whether
>it's a historical accident of OE _beorhte_ having lost its adverbial ending.
That one to my native Sprachgefuehl is ambiguously a depictive or a manner
adverb. Maybe the morphology argues for the former. Of course you're right
about the OE development which allows this confoundment.
Alex
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