Article published in:
Diachronica
Vol. 35:1 (2018) ► pp. 107–143

Near done; awful stable; really changing

The suffixless adverb in dialects of the UK

| University of Toronto

This paper examines adverb formation with -ly, e.g., slow/slowly, and uses a large archive of synchronic dialects to uncover the current state and historical trajectory of this process. The results reveal that English adverbs are a variegated system. The intensifying adverb really is a frequent form while sentential adverbs appear to be a newer layer in the system. In contrast, manner adverbs are constrained by the semantic interpretation of the adverb as abstract or concrete. These results expose the complexity of the English adverb system and demonstrate that adverb formation is an ideal site for uncovering historical processes in synchronic data.

Keywords: morphological variation, British dialects, variation and change, -ly adverbs, adverb formation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Historical perspective
  • 3.Constraints on adverb form
    • 3.1Adverb function
    • 3.2Semantics of manner adverbs
    • 3.3Syntactic position
    • 3.4Summary
  • 4.Synchronic perspective – UK
  • 5.The present study
  • 6.Data and methods
    • 6.1Circumscribing the variable context
    • 6.2Exceptional distributions
  • 7.Results
    • 7.1Distributional analysis
    • 7.2Semantics of manner adverbs
    • 7.3Syntactic position
    • 7.4Mixed effects modelling
    • 7.5Conditional inference tree
  • 8.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 April 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.16027.tag
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