Editors: Olivier Duplâtre, Fryni Kakoyianni-Doa, Pierre-Yves Modicom
ELAD-SILDA, Studies in Linguistics and Discourse Analysis, Vol. 11, 2025(1)
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Adverbs have long been the target of many debates among grammarians and linguists: this notion encompasses a very broad and heterogeneous range of items which are subsumed under the same umbrella on the basis of intuition (Blumenthal 1990: 41). Similarly, Quirk et al. (1972: 267) or Gleason (1965: 129) underline how the heterogeneity of this class undermines its position in the set of traditional parts of speech. To some extent, the lexical class of adverbs is used as a terminological expedient for all unbound, uninflected lexemes of Standard Average European (SAE) languages (Rauh 2015: 38). Besides, a typological survey suggests that this class, however fuzzy and all-encompassing, is superfluous for the description of certain (types of) languages. As a typological tool, the notion of modifier (encompassing adverbs and adjectives) may well be a more convenient category (see Hengeveld and Velsta 2010).
Even in SAE languages, the diachronic study of adverbial derivation is full of nominal heads turning into adverbial affixes (in Germanic and Romance), of markers of manner turning into morphemes for higher-order adverbs (like German -(er)weise), and of inflectional marks being used as word-class-changing affixes (Haspelmath 1995). Outside the SAE area, converbs raise similarly challenging questions (Haspelmath & König 1995): should converb be regarded as deverbal adverbs or as verbal forms in adverbial function ? And is this distinction relevant at all ?
Other interfaces involve the distinction between adverbs vs. prepositions, adverbs vs. discourse markers, adverbs vs. particles, adverbs vs. subordinators, adverbs vs. quantifiers, and (deictic and anaphoric, see König & Umbach 2018) adverbs vs. pronouns (see for instance the huge amount of literature on the status of German so, most recently Catasso 2023).
The functional category of adverbial has been proposed as an alternative to the adverb (Nølke [1990], Pittner [1999]) or as a primary concept for the definition of adverbs (Maienborn & Schäfer 2019). However, the notion of adverbial shares the fuzziness of the “adverb”. For some authors like Nølke (1990:17), the “adverbial” even has to be defined negatively. The result is often that manner adverbials, epistemic adverbials, evaluative adverbials and circumstantials are lumped together: does it have to be so? How far can we really combine syntactic and semantic features in the definition of these functional classes? Do these classes really correspond to functionally-defined syntactic positions, or are they family resemblances at the lexical level?
These questions are even more striking if we consider the amount of items that are semantically and functionnally ambiguous or under-specified and can be used, for instance, both as a manner adverb and as a speaker-oriented evaluative adverb (e.g. in Romance, for many -ment and -mente lexemes; Guimier 1996, Molinier & Levrier 2000, Paillard 2021, among many others). Should we speak of polysemy or should we rather insist on semantic identity and devolve variation to syntax, by claiming that the difference between a manner adverb and an evaluative adverb, or a circumstancial and a domain adverb, is ultimately a matter of how syntactic hierarchies determine the scope of the adverb?
But in the case of adverbs and adverbials, even functional definitions raise major issue for parts-of-speech theories, especially considering the now classical opposition between verb-framed and satellite-framed languages, going back to Talmy (1991) (see Sarda & Fagard 2021 for a recent discussion): the expression of path vs. the manner of motion involves a type-specific distribution of roles between the verb and what is often described as an adverbial satellites; these two components or co-events, being semantically on a par, are expressed by syntactically unequal expressions. Still, one could wonder if this recruitment of syntactically unequal expressions for semantically equal components does not entail functional idiosyncrasies that jeopardize the reduction of adverbials to modifiers. For instance, the directional adverb, adverbial or particle of satellite-framed languages may well display hierarchical features normally associated with the verb, as in German, where the “adverbial” is obligatory, unlike the verb itself:
|
Ich |
muss |
jetzt |
in |
die |
Stadt |
(High German) |
|
I |
must |
now |
in |
DEF.DIR |
town |
|
|
“Now I must go in town.” |
||||||
The distinction between verb and satellite actually presupposes some notion like “adverbial” or “modifier”. In the last years, motion events have also been studied from the perspective of languages displaying Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs): what can we learn about the functional status of path and manner from languages that express the co-events or co-features of motion through SVCs? Is motion the only semantic domain where we can observe some functional reversibility between verbal heads and adverbial satellites?
All these questions have many implications that go beyond the field of adverb research: Is the distinction between adverbs and adjectives, adverbs and prepositions, etc. tenable from a cross-linguistic point of view? Is the functional opposition between verbal head and adverbial modifier really more solid than the traditional classification of parts-of-speech? Can we draw a sharp line between functional categories? How should we distinguish between functional polysemy, heterosemy and semantic under-determination? Are there polysemous adverbs? These are all questions that deserve careful examination, whether in the context of the study of a given language or in a contrastive or typological framework.
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The 11th issue of ELAD-SILDA, to be published in March 2025, will be devoted to these questions. Papers of 8,000 to 20,000 signs (including empty spaces) are welcome, dealing on any aspect of the call in any language. The languages of publication will be French, English and German. Guidelines for authors can be found here:
https://publications-prairial.fr/elad-silda/index.php?id=939
The papers can be submitted to elad-silda@univ-lyon3.fr until January 15th, 2024. Authors are kindly asked to send a working title and a few lines of presentation of their future paper by December, 15th, to the same address.