On the adjective/adverb interface: subject-related -ly

Title: On the adjective/adverb interface: subject-related -ly
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2022, vol. 48, iss. 1, pp. 51-69
Extent
51-69
  • ISSN
    0524-6881 (print)
    1805-0867 (online)
Type: Article
Language
 

Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.

Abstract(s)
Subject-relatedness is a term used to define subject-oriented -ly adverbs that are not liable to convey adverbial meaning and only retain the predicative function (Díaz-Negrillo 2014, Valera 2014). Previous corpus evidence of subject-relatedness has been found in colour adjectives (Valera 2014), which seems to restrict subject-relatedness to this narrow semantic class but, as colour adjectives are central members of this word-class (cf. Dixon 1977), the relevance of these subject-related adverbs may be higher than presumed. The present paper presents results of a systematic corpus search of 17,460 BNC bigrams containing verbs followed by subject-related -ly adverbs. The results show subject-relatedness beyond colour adjectives alone and in a wide range of combinations. The interpretations of the mismatch between the suffix -ly and the categorial meaning associated with this suffix or with the structures where they appear are manifold and could make an impact on the classification of adjectives and adverbs.
Note
This paper has been supported by the Spanish State Research Agency (SRA, Ministry of Science and Innovation) and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) (Ref. PID2020-119851GB-I00-AEI-10.13039-501100011033).
References
[1] Baayen, Harald & Lieber, Rochelle (1991) Productivity and English derivation: A corpus-based study. Linguistics 29 (5), 801–844.

[2] Bauer, Laurie (2014) 'What is the plural of mouse?' and other unhelpful questions for morphologist. Plenary lecture delivered at the 47th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europea, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, 11th-14th September 2014.

[3] Davies, Mark (2016) British National Corpus. Available at: https://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/old/(Accessed on 2021-11-05).

[4] Díaz-Negrillo, Ana (2014) Subject-relatedness in -ly premodifying adverbs. English Studies 95 (4) 459–474. | DOI 10.1080/0013838x.2014.897092

[5] Dixon, Robert M. W. (1977) Where have all the adjectives gone?. Studies in Language 1, 1–80.

[6] Giegerich, Heinz J. (2012) The morphology of -ly and the categorial status of 'adverbs' in English. English Language and Linguistics 16 (3), 341–359. | DOI 10.1017/s1360674312000147

[7] Givón, Talmy (1993) English Grammar. A Function-based Introduction. Volume I. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.

[8] Guimier, Claude (1991) Sur l'adverbe orienté vers le sujet. In: Guimier, Claude & Larcher, Pierre (eds.) Les états de l'adverbe. Rennes: Presses Universitaires, 97–114.

[9] Hummel, Martin (2014) The adjective-adverb interface in Romance and English. In: Sleeman, Petra & Van de Velde, Freek and Harry Perridon (eds.) Adjectives in Germanic and Romance. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 35–72 | DOI 10.1075/la.212.02hum

[10] Kjellmer, Göran (1984) Why great: greatly but not big: *bigly?. Studia Linguistica 38 (1), 1–19.

[11] Payne, John, Huddleston, Rodney and K. Pullum, Geoffrey (2010) The distribution and category status of adjectives and adverbs. Word Structure 3 (1), 31–81.

[12] Pierrehumbert, Janet B. and Granell, Ramon (2018) On hapax legomena and morphological productivity. In: Kuebler, Sandra & Nicolai, Garrett (ed.) Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, October 31, 2018. Brussels, Belgium, 125–130. | DOI 10.18653/v1/w18-5814

[13] Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London and New York: Longman.

[14] Ross, John R. and George Lakoff (1967) Stative adjectives and verbs. (NSF-17). Harvard University Computational Laboratory.

[15] Valera, Salvador (1998) On subject-orientation in English -ly adverbs. English Language and Linguistics, 2 (2), 263–282. | DOI 10.1017/s1360674300000885

[16] Valera, Salvador (2014) English -ly adverbs: from subject orientation to conversion. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 49 (1), 77–102. | DOI 10.2478/stap-2014-0004

[17] Valera-Hernández, Salvador & Rizo-Rodríguez, Alfonso (1998) A LOB Corpus-based semantic profile of the adjective in English supplementive clauses. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 3 (2), 251–-278. | DOI 10.1075/ijcl.3.2.05val