Olivier Duplâtre – författare

Adverbs seem to raise unsolvable issues for theories of word-classes, both crosslinguistically and language-internally. The contributions in this volume all address this categorial problem from a variety of formal and functional points of view. In the first part, current definitions of the class for Romance and Germanic languages are being questioned and improved, drawing on data from English, German and Italian. The second part is devoted to adverbial scope in Romance (French, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese), Germanic, Modern Greek and Chinese, under special consideration of modal adverbs, subject-oriented manner adverbs and domain adverbs and adverbials. Syntactic and semantic relationships appear to lay the ground for a robust and fine-grained functional definition of adverbs and adverbials.

Traditional grammar distinguishes adverbs by establishing semantic classes: adverbs of place are the starting point of this classification, followed by adverbs of time and manner adverbs. But what is manner? Unlike space or time, it has never been the subject of in-depth investigation. We take for granted that it is an ontological category, which the question "how" detects, but what else can be said about this concept? Where does manner originate? How is it encoded linguistically, especially in adverbless languages? Given that the question "how" can also cover such heterogeneous notions as degree, instrument, etc., is manner an elusive concept or can it be precisely defined?