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In:Adverbs: Functional and diachronic aspects
Edited by Karin Pittner, Daniela Elsner and Fabian Barteld
[Studies in Language Companion Series 170] 2015
► pp. 19–46

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Adverbs as a linguistic category (?)

 | University of Wuppertal
Published online: 24 September 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.170.02rau
The main purpose of this paper is to show what kind of category adverbs form. It is demonstrated that the words of a language are in general categorized in two different ways, based on different properties and serving different purposes. First, they form a small set of part-of-speech categories which are prototypical in nature, serve the cognitive structuring of the lexical inventory of a language, but as such have no single grammatical function. Second, they form numerous syntactic distributional categories whose members share a fixed set of syntactically relevant properties that determine their distribution. It is argued that adverbs are also subject to both types of categorization, though with particular properties that explain their often-stated heterogeneity.
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Zhang, Yi
2022. Chinese adverbs. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 20:2 ► pp. 330 ff. DOI logo
Strik Lievers, Francesca, Marianna Bolognesi & Bodo Winter
2021. The linguistic dimensions of concrete and abstract concepts: lexical category, morphological structure, countability, and etymology. Cognitive Linguistics 32:4 ► pp. 641 ff. DOI logo
Geuder, Wilhelm
2019. Eine Art Wortart: Das Adverb im Deutschen. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 38:2 ► pp. 191 ff. DOI logo
Hummel, Martin
2017. Adjectives with adverbial functions in Romance. In Adjective Adverb Interfaces in Romance [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 242], ► pp. 13 ff. DOI logo

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