Searching for adverbs: a look into the nature of adverbial modifiers from Basque manner adverbials

Abstract

This work aims at tackling the theoretical problem regarding the categorial nature and morphosyntactic structure of so-called adverbs. In order to do so, first, I discuss the main difficulties that we have to face in order to give a coherent definition of the adverb as a grammatical category. This discussion underlines the fact that although the term adverb is commonly used in the literature, it has never received an unambiguous definition, and therefore, it remains a term that confuses semantic, syntactic and morphological criteria. For that reason, some authors (Emonds 1985, 1987; Baker 2003) have defended that no independent adverbial category is needed and that words commonly identified as adverbs may belong to already existing and better-defined categories. I subscribe to this hypothesis, and in the second part of this work, based on Basque adverbials built with the suffix -ki and the morphosyntactic analysis that I propose to account for it, I offer evidence in favour of it. The suffix -ki is analogous to English -ly or Romance -ment(e) and it has often been presented as a derivational suffix, just like its English and Romance counterparts. However, this analysis fails to explain some aspects of the behaviour of these suffixes. For this reason, I will present an alternative analysis for Basque -ki adverbials based on Rubin’s (1994) proposal for the syntactic and semantic analysis of modifiers. According to this hypothesis, modifiers project syntactically through a functional head (called Modification Phrase, ModP). I propose the suffix -ki is the lexical instantiation of the Mod head and as such it can take words from different categories as its argument: adjectives, but also nouns, participles or apparent postpositional phrases. Other adverbials may also fit in the same analysis, since apparent postpositions (such as -an ‘in’, -z ‘by’, -kin ‘with’) will be argued to be further instantiations of this functional head. Likewise, words that look like adjectives but act as adverbials (such as azkar in azkar etorri ‘to come fast’) are analysed as ModPs too, where the Mod head has no phonological substance. This framework will enable a unified account of all adverbials formed with the -ki suffix as well as other Basque adverbials formed differently. This unified account will lead me to the conclusion that no independent adverbial category is needed to describe these cases, and that Basque adverbials should be conceived as items from other categories that may act as modifiers when embedded in the appropriate functional structure.