Pernilla Hallonsten Halling

Adverb as a part of speech

1. Introduction

In this chapter, I will discuss the potential part of speech status of adverbs and the implications of regarding adverb as a category in its own right. Problems surrounding the determination of adverb as a part of speech are described in section 9.2. Following this, I discuss various approaches to parts of speech in section 9.3, with a focus on the typological perspective taken in this dissertation. In section 9.4, I turn to the question of why adverbs differ from other parts of speech, once they are regarded as belonging to such a category. The chapter closes with a concluding discussion in section 9.5.

2. The problematic adverb

The determination of whether adverbs in general belong to one and the same part of speech category is complicated by several circumstances. First, it is unclear whether adverbs should be defined as a lexical or a functional category. As illustrated in this dissertation, many typical adverbs are property words (e.g. quickly ), which are clearly lexical, whereas other adverbs have grammatical meaning such as aspect (e.g. completely). In certain cases, lexical and grammatical meanings are not very far apart. For instance, in He answered quickly, the adverb may mean either ‘quickly’ as a property of ‘being quick’, or it may mean ‘soon’, as a specification of time (cf. the discussion in chapter 8). Further complicating the matter is the fact that some items that are usually classified as adverbs appear to have neither lexical nor grammatical meaning, but are rather deictic, e.g. there or today. Another unusual characteristic of adverbs is the fact that they rarely inflect, with the exception of comparative and superlative constructions such as run fast – faster
– fastest, which appear to primarily pertain to property-denoting adverbs, although there are exceptions to this too, e.g. soon – sooner – soonest. This deviates from the behavior of other traditional parts of speech: nouns, verbs, and adjectives often show extensive inflection. Another reason why adverbs tend to be questioned in discussions of parts of speech is the fact that they are less frequent compared to other categories, both within and across languages. If only adverbs denoting properties are considered as the basis for a potential adverb category, then the adverb category is very small in most languages where it occurs. Adverbs are also recurrently said to be rare cross-linguistically. For instance, Loeb-Diehl (2005: 9) calls languages with a lexical category of manner adverbs (which includes derived adverbs) “a definite minority among the languages of the world”. Finally, as discussed extensively in chapter 2, adverbs in general occur on different syntactic levels, making them far more diverse in this sense than other parts of speech.

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