Wise adverbs and the functional hierarchy

This article presents a case study on Dutch adverbs formed with the suffix -erwijs. It addresses two research questions that have been raised in the literature. Firstly, it asks the question whether other Germanic adverbial suffixes are equivalents of this suffix. It is shown that -erwijs can realise a large subset of the Cinquean adverbial projections. It is pointed out that the question whether other affixes are equivalents of the -erwijs suffix is therefore unprecise and misguided: adverbial suffixes may realize sets of adverbial syntactic projections, subsets of which may also be realized by other adverbial affixes. Secondly, it investigates whether there is a structural relation between adverbs formed with the suffix -erwijs and present participles. We show that the adverbs built on participles fail to project verbal argument structure. This leads to an interesting puzzle, where the adverbs morphologically appear to contain the participle, but do not contain a verb semantically. We propose to solve this puzzle by putting verbal argument structure projecting heads higher in the structure than the participial suffix, which we take to be a mere adjectiviser.