Adverbial morphology in German

This article is concerned with a morphological well defined subclass of words, which are usually considered to be adverbs: -weise-formations, like wechselweise (‘alternately’), flaschenweise (‘in (single) bottles/a lot of’), glücklicherweise (‘fortunately’), or lesenderweise (‘?in a reading manner/while reading’). Based on the assumption that -weise and -erweise should be treated as two different suffixes, the former attaching to nouns, the latter attaching to adjectives and participles, certain hitherto neglected uses of the suffixes are investigated. A subgroup of nominal -weise-formations can be used as quantifying determiners (mit kiloweise Schminke ‘with a lot of make-up’), and some adjectival -erweise-formations function as manner adverbials (biertrinkenderweise ‘?in a beer drinking manner/while drinking beer’). We argue that the overall function of the suffixes is to make possible different types of manner adverbial readings and in cases where this is not needed a sentence adverbial reading developed.