Search results for "adverb"
showing 10 items of 58 documents
Revisión de la categoría «adverbio» en español
2009
Among all word classes, the adverb is the worst defined and studied grammatical category. All grammarians accept that this category includes very heterogeneous elements, which come from very different origins and have very different functions. There is thus an urgent need to review this grammatical category. With this work, I intend to find an answer to the following questions: How the grammatical theory on the adverb has been developed? Which have been the mistakes of the grammatical tradition by producing a theory on the adverb? What should we actually understand by an adverb? How can we order, in a proper and reasonable way, the elements which are presently grouped in the so called «adve…
Bene: Adverb or noun?
2013
When Italian bene ‘good / well’ occurs with fare ‘do / make’, several constructs with remarkably different argument frames are involved. This paper deals with three of them: (a) Il latte fa bene ai bambini ‘Milk is good for children’; (b) Fa bene il suo lavoro ‘She does her job well’, and (c) Faresti bene a non dire niente ‘You would do well to say nothing about it’. We discuss dictionary discrepancies concerning the lexical category of bene in (a), which we take to be a noun predicate, and draw a distinction between the adverbial uses in (b) and (c).
<i>Cuesta arriba e por llano</i>: The development of “postpositions” in Spanish and Catalan
2005
In this article we analyze the formation of Spanish and Catalan phrases with an intransitive locative adverb preceded by a bare noun. These constructions can have a meaning of path and direction (i. e. Sp. rio abajo, Cat. riu avall ‘downriver’) as well as body orientation (i. e. Sp. cara abajo, Cat. cara avall ‘face down’). A detailed analysis of the available historical documentation suggests the hypothesis that these constructions derive from more complex expressions headed by a preposition that lost its phonological properties, without losing its semantic and syntactic features. The presence of a phonologically null preposition is licensed both by the meaning of the incorporated noun and…
Simetries de mirall en l’ordre intern de les construccions absolutes: del català antic al català actual
2016
Resum: Se sol assumir que les construccions absolutes manifesten les mateixes propietats sintàctiques i interpretatives que les subordinades adverbials però, en contrast amb aquestes, no disposen d’un subordinant explícit. En aquest article argumentarem en contra d’aquesta idea. Partint de l’anàlisi de la dislocació del subjecte en el català primitiu i en l’actual, justificarem que les CA encapçalades per una vegada i un cop en català tenen un subordinant format composicionalment per dues porcions discontinues: d’una banda, una preposició incorporada en l’estructura sublèxica del participi, seguint la proposta de Gallego & Hernanz (2012) i, de l’altra, una expressió temporal (una vegada, un…
Problems with primary vs. secondary grammaticalization: the case of East and mainland Southeast Asian languages
2015
Abstract The present paper aims at testing four criteria for the distinction between primary vs. secondary grammaticalization in East and mainland Southeast Asian languages. These languages are of special interest for research on grammaticalization because they show limitations in the coevolution of meaning and form and because pragmatic inference is very prominent (lack of obligatory grammatical markers, multifunctionality). If the four criteria work in these languages, this can be taken as a good indicator for their cross-linguistic, maybe universal relevance. The criteria are tested with three markers that stand for three different types of multifunctionality: (i) the Khmer verb baːn ‘co…
Secondary grammaticalization and the English adverbial -ly suffix
2015
Author's version of an article in the journal: Language sciences. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2014.10.003 This paper discusses the secondary grammaticalization of the English adverbial -ly suffix and makes claims about the concept of secondary grammaticalization. Secondary grammaticalization is defined as the development of a new grammatical function in an already grammatical element. It is shown that the development of the -ly suffix involves a number of the processes which are associated with grammaticalization, e.g. paradigmatization, specialization, obligatorification, subjectification, layering and persistence. However, none of these proces…
Relación entre el grado de certeza y los valores de F0 y duración silábica en algunos adverbios terminados en -mente
2014
espanolLos nueve adverbios analizados en este articulo (‘exactamente’, ‘indudablemente’, ‘efectivamente’, ‘evidentemente’, ‘obviamente’, ‘seguramente’, ‘posiblemente’, ‘probablemente’, ‘supuestamente’) evaluan la certeza del enunciado al que se adjuntan; en tal sentido, el principal objetivo de este articulo es observar la relacion entre el grado de certeza y el grado de marcacion fonica observable en los valores de F0 y de duracion silabica. Para ello, se han recogido 126 archivos de audio procedentes de corpus de espanol espontaneo (Corpus Val.Es.Co, COLA, Corpus de Referencia de la Lengua Espanola Contemporanea), se han transcrito con el programa PRAAT y, posteriormente, se han analizado…
Machine-readable entailments with the Italian 'prendere' construction expressing hitting and insulting events
2022
The Italian language features a little debated transitive construction with prendere ‘to take/to catch’ in which a prepositional phrase (PP) with an adverbial value occurs mandatorily (e.g. Lui prese a pugni Leo ‘He punched Leo’). Semantically, this construction often implies the use of physical force or verbal offence. In the hitting or insulting event, the notional subject generally is a [+ Human] Agent, whilst the notional direct object generally is a [+ Animate] Affectee ([1]: 4). It can be contended that prendere, which carries no literal meaning, is zero-valent and that the predicate assigning semantic roles is the PP. A computational tool will be illustrated, …