Pernilla Hallonsten Halling

Inflection and derivation

As touched upon above, adverbs display a number of peculiarities connected to inflection and derivation. Cross-linguistically, adverbs rarely display any inflection. A few cases are nonetheless attested among the languages of the sample. In Yankunytjatjara (Pama- Nyungan), Active Adjectives (which I place among adverbs) show inflectional agreement for case according to the actor.
(9.2) Yankunytjatjara (Pama-Nyungan)² (Goddard 1985: 30)

wati-ngku
man-erg
wala-ngku
quickly-erg
kati-nyi
take-prs

‘The man is bringing it quickly/slowly.’


Outside the sample of the present study, Corbett (2006: 44) finds agreement on “items which according to their syntactic behaviour and according to their semantics are adverbs” in a number of geographically distant languages. Archi (Nakh-Daghestanian) is one such case. A particularly interesting example pair can be found in (9.3), where a time adverb takes agreement markers.

(9.3) Archi (Nakh-Daghestanian) (Kibrik 1994: 349, cited in Corbett 2006)

1. 
   buwa-mu
   

mother(ii)-erg
b-ez
iii-1sg.dat
di^¯tau
early
X¯^walli
bread(iii)[abs]
au
made

‘Mother made bread for me early.’

2. 
   dija-mu
   

Father(i)-erg
ez
[iv]1sg.dat