Pernilla Hallonsten Halling

Derived adverbs

It has been shown (in section 5.2) that simple adverbs are attested in unrelated languages from around the world. Along the same lines, it is interesting to speculate how common it is to derive adverbs from adjectives, as in the case of the -ly ending in English, or whether there are any other recurrent derivation patterns. Among the languages of the sample, adverbs derived from adjectives with a marker (potentially with variants) that is mainly devoted to the derivation of adverbs is attested in only four languages: Basque (isolate), Ewe (Atlantic-Congo), Lezgian (Nakh-Daghestanian), and Turkish (Turkic). In Lezgian, Adverbs are derived from Adjectives by one of the two suffixes -dakaz and –diz /-z, or a variant thereof.

(5.9) Lezgian (Nakh-Daghestanian) (Haspelmath 1993: 196)

Jusuf.A
Jusuf(erg)
ne-lAj
who-srel
xˆAjit’Ani
indf
q^hsAn-diz

good-aDv

mAni-jAr
song-pl
luhu-zwA.
say-ipfv
adv

‘Jusuf sings better than anyone.’

In a few other languages, adverbs are derived from adjectives by attaching a clitic. This is illustrated in (5.10) for Imonda (Border). The clitic =nam that occurs here also has the function of deriving other types of Adverbs from other classes, e.g. Adverbs of time from Nouns. Of course, this could also be argued for the English -ly ending, exemplified by, e.g., daily, weekly (although they are used both in attr and adv, e.g. daily news and run daily ).

(5.10) Imonda (Border) (Seiler 1985: 29)

õh-nèl
prox-src