Seediq adverbial verbs

This paper addresses adverbial verbs found in Formosan languages and evaluates two competing hypotheses which attempt to derive this phenomenon from other features of the language. The predication hypothesis links the phenomenon to verb-initial word order, while the adverbial heads hypothesis places them as heads of adverbial phrases within the backbone of the clause, along the lines of Cinque (1999). It is shown that the predictions of the latter hypothesis are empirically confirmed, although the former hypothesis is typologically more ambitious.