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Part of
Adjective Adverb Interfaces in Romance
Edited by Martin Hummel and Salvador Valera
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 242] 2017
► pp. 257–286

Chapter 9
Adverbial adjectives and -mente adverbs face to face

Diachronic evidence from Spanish

| Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
The paper compares five minimal pairs of adverbial adjectives (aa) and -mente adverbs in two periods of Spanish, the 18th and the 21st centuries. The hypothesis is that aa keeps “traces” or “memory” of its original adjective category, and for that reason, to recategorize as an adverb, aa needs to exhibit more cohesion with the verb, a rigid relative v-aa order, appearing in contexts having a greater number of nominals than -mente, and appearing in sentences or paragraphs with lesser event complexity, as compared to -mente forms. -Mente has surpassed the np status from old times, it is a true adverb, able to enter in more contexts than aa, and able to enter in more complex sentences and event relationships.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: An intriguing relation
  • 2.State of the art
    • 2.1Synchronic grammar
      • 2.1.1Category
      • 2.1.2Types of adverbial adjective
      • 2.1.3Scope
      • 2.1.4Cohesion and distribution
      • 2.1.5Grammaticality
      • 2.1.6Lexical restrictions
      • 2.1.7Basic meaning, polysemy and the role of context
      • 2.1.8Morphological and semantic problems
    • 2.2Diachrony
      • 2.2.1Historical depth
      • 2.2.2Status of -mente adverbs
      • 2.2.3Type of change
      • 2.2.4Capacity to subjectivize
    • 2.3Sociolinguistics, text genre and register
    • 2.4Dialectology
    • 2.5Summary
  • 3.Corpus
  • 4.Research questions and hypothesis
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1Adjacency
    • 5.2Relative order of verb and adverb
    • 5.3Nominality binding
    • 5.4Complexity of the event
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 21 December 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.242.10com
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Métairy, Justine
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Hummel, Martin
2017. La structure “verbe + adjectif”. Revue Romane. Langue et littérature. International Journal of Romance Languages and Literatures ► pp. 261 ff. DOI logo

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