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The morphology of -ly and the categorial status of ‘adverbs’ in English1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 October 2012

HEINZ J. GIEGERICH
HEINZ J. GIEGERICH*
Affiliation:
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AD, Scotland, [email protected]
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Abstract

I argue in this article that adverb-forming -ly, unlike its adjective-forming counterpart, is an inflectional suffix, that therefore adverbs containing -ly are inflected adjectives and that, consequently, adverbs not containing -ly are uninflected adjectives. I demonstrate that in English, the traditional category Adverb is morphologically non-distinct from the category Adjective in that it has no morphology of its own but instead shares all relevant aspects of the morphology of adjectives. I demonstrate moreover that such an analysis explains various aspects of morphological and phonological behaviour on the part of adverbial -ly which differ from the behaviour of adjectival -ly and/or from the behaviour of derivational suffixes. And I argue that contrary to a recent claim, the syntactic behaviour of adverbs presents no obstacle to the single-category analysis of adjectives and adverbs warranted by the morphology.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , November 2012 , pp. 341 - 359
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

1

This article is at least in part a response to Payne, Huddleston & Pullum (2010). Indeed, it probably owes its very existence to conversations with my departmental colleague Geoff Pullum, whose disagreement I gratefully and cheerfully acknowledge. Heike Baeskow, Nik Gisborne, Tracy Hall, S. J. Hannahs, Donka Minkova, Ingo Plag, Hans-Jörg Schmid, Greg Stump and two anonymous reviewers have also provided helpful comments and suggestions.

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