Adverb formation and modification: English, German and Dutch adverbial morphology in contrast

• Authors: Janneke Diepeveen
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

In this paper I propose a framework for a contrastive investigation of English, German and Dutch adverbial suffixes. According to the morphological literature, these three genetically related languages have an inventory of suffixes for the creation of adverbs. However, only English has a systematic process of adverb formation (namely, with the suffix -ly) whereas German and Dutch lack such regularity. Any attempt at investigating German and Dutch adverbs and adverb formation more closely has to deal with problematic formal class distinctions. In this paper I aim to show that a function-based approach sheds new light on the notion of adverbial morphology and that the traditional conception of “adverbial suffixes” as morphemes for adverb formation may need to be fine-tuned. As such, a contrastive study of English, German and Dutch adverbial morphology from a functional perspective can contribute to a greater understanding of the more general issue of the demarcation of a class of adverbs.

Keywords

EN

adverbs; adverbial suffixes; word-formation; modification; contrastive linguistics

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Journal: Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
• Year: 2011
• Volume: 47
• Pages: 710

Dates

published

2011

received

2010-12-01

revised

2011-05-01

accepted

2011-06-20

Contributors

author

Janneke Diepeveen

• Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/psicl-2011-0036