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Extravagant Morphology: Studies in rule-bending, pattern-extending and theory-challenging morphology
Edited by Matthias Eitelmann and Dagmar Haumann
[Studies in Language Companion Series 223] 2022
► pp. 51–72

Extravagance, productivity and the development of -ingly adverbs

The paper claims that the process of deriving -ly adverbs from present participles has become increasingly productive over the last 500 years. It is argued that many ‘-ingly adverbs’ are extravagant, in the sense of Haspelmath (1999). This claim is supported by the fact that such adverbs are very common in prose fiction, which is a genre that admits of extravagant language. It is hypothesised that the category of -ingly adverbs has evolved around a few frequent types but that extravagant -ingly uses have caused the category to expand by pushing at the boundaries of what is considered acceptable. The change is explained within an exemplar-based model of morphological change and against the backdrop of ‘adverbialisation’.
Keywords: morphological productivity, adverbialisation, -ly adverbs, exemplars
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Aims and organization
  • 2.Theoretical preliminaries: Extravagance, creativity and productivity
    • 2.1Extravagance and creativity
    • 2.2Productivity
  • 3.The development of -ingly adverbs: relevant research
  • 4.Data sources and methodology
  • 5.The quantitative development of -ingly adverbs
    • 5.1The overall productivity of -ingly derivation: data from the four fiction corpora
    • 5.2The development of the various adverbial categories: An overview
    • 5.3Some innovative users – and uses – of -ingly adverbs and the question of extravagance
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Research question 1: The productivity of -ingly derivation in the last 500 years
    • 6.2Research question 2: Factors triggering the development of -ingly adverbs and the role of extravagance
    • 6.3Adverbialisation, analogues, and the role of frequent users
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Data sources
  • References
Published online: 16 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.223.03kil
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Data sources
[BNC] Davies, Mark. (2004-) BYU-BNC. (Based on the British National Corpus from Oxford University Press). Available online at [URL]
[ECF] Eighteenth-Century Fiction. 1996. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey.Google Scholar
[EEPF] Early English Prose Fiction. 1997. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey.Google Scholar
[NCF] Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 1999–2000. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey.
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Schillová, Aksana
2023. Adverbs Derived from Adjectival Present Participles in Polish, Slovak and Czech: A Comparative Corpus-Based Study. Journal of Linguistics/Jazykovedný casopis 74:1 ► pp. 119 ff. DOI logo

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