Pernilla Hallonsten Halling

di^¯tau
early
nokì’
house(iv)[abs]
a<👉>w
made

‘Father made a house for me early.’

² (9.2) is repeated from (6.22) in section 6.4.1.

In (9.3a), di^¯ta-b-u ‘early’ has an infix -b- that indicates gender III singular, in this way

agreeing with X¯^walli ‘bread’. In (9.3b), the same adverb instead takes the infix -t’-,
which marks gender IV singular, agreeing with nokì’ ‘house’. As accounted for in the comprehensive volume on Archi edited by Bond et al. (2016), gender is marked on fairly few lexical items, even though those that it does occur on are unusual targets for gender. It could thus be the case that since few lexemes indicate gender, it is generously distributed across different parts of speech (Bernhard Wälchli, p.c.). The fact that gender is marked on adverbs such as the one in (9.3) then does not necessarily say something about adverbs as such, but rather about the complex gender system of Archi.
The most commonly encountered inflection on adverbs is probably that of comparative and superlative constructions. In languages that have adjectives that can be compared inflectionally, the same strategy is sometimes employed for adverbs. In Swedish, fort ‘quickly’ – fortare ‘more quickly’ – fortast ‘most quickly’ has the same inflectional com- parative and superlative forms as snabb ‘quick’ – snabbare ‘quicker’ – snabbast ‘quickest’. This can be argued to hold in English as well, in the case of run quickly – run quicker
– run quickest. In Lithuanian (Indo-European, not represented in my sample), where Adverbs are derived from Adjectives, Adverbs inflect similarly although not identically to Adjectives, in the comparative and superlative constructions. This is illustrated in table
9.7 (note that the exemplified Adjectives are in the nominative here).

Table 9.7. Comparison of Lithuanian Adjectives and Adverbs with the example ‘good’/‘well’ (Mathiassen 1996: 62–64, 173)

Positive Comparative Superlative

_Adjective m g˜eras ger-èsn-is ger-iáus-ias

f gerà ger-èsn-e˙
Adverb ger-a˜ı ger-iau˜
ger-iáus-ia ger-iáusiai

Lithuanian Adverbs have their own comparative, i.e. -iau˜. The superlative ending could, on the one hand, be a complex formation of the adjective superlative -iáus and the adver- bial suffix -iai, as pointed out by Ambrazas (2006: 386). On the other hand, Mathiassen (1996: 173) does not separate this ending into two suffixes (which is why they are not separated in table 9.7). Accordingly, although the comparison of adverbs can be related or in some instances even be identical to the comparison of adjectives, it is not necessarily always the case, as illustrated by Lithuanian, at least in part.
Another distinctive feature of adverbs is their apparent inability to act as the basis of derivation. The opposite direction of derivation, where adverbs are derived from other categories, occurs productively in many languages. Kewa (Nuclear Trans New Guinea) has an extensive adverb-deriving pattern, in addition to a small closed Adverb class. The adverbializing enclitic =rupa may be attached to “any stem which is not already an adverb” (Franklin 1971: 34). The clitic may in fact even attach to a whole clause. Several examples are provided in (9.4), where the source for the derivation is indicated in the right margin. As illustrated in (9.4e), it appears that =rupa can also attach at least to

certain simple Adverbs, in spite of Franklin’s claim (1971: 34).

(9.4) Kewa (Nuclear Trans New Guinea) (Franklin 1971: 34, 82, 69)

1. 
   ní
   

I
áá=rupa

man=aDvz

píralua
I.will.sit
Noun > Adverb

‘I will sit like a man.’

2. 
   ní
   

I
étaa
food