29.4884, Review: Romance; Linguistic Theories; Morphology; Semantics; Syntax: Hummel, Valera (2017)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-29-4884. Fri Dec 07 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.4884, Review: Romance; Linguistic Theories; Morphology; Semantics; Syntax: Hummel, Valera (2017)

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Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2018 10:31:25
From: Berta González Saavedra [bgonzalezsaavedra at gmail.com]
Subject: Adjective Adverb Interfaces in Romance

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-204.html

EDITOR: Martin  Hummel
EDITOR: Salvador  Valera
TITLE: Adjective Adverb Interfaces in Romance
SERIES TITLE: Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 242
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Berta González Saavedra, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

SUMMARY

The book Adjective Adverb Interfaces in Romance, edited by Martin Hummel and
Salvador Valera, is structured by an Introduction and five parts, one about
general aspects (consisting of three chapters) and four more, devoted to
French (two chapters), Italian (one chapter), Rumanian (two chapters) and
Spanish (the last four chapters).

The introduction has been written by the editors of the volume. In it, they
explain that this book was conceived after a conference held at the University
of Graz in June 2014, whose title was “Adjective and Adverb in Romance and
English”. The conference and the book were motivated by the different
behaviour of adverbs and adjectives, which could seem very clear, but it is
not, according to the uses of adjectives as events modificators (“she drives
slow”) or other contexts where adjectives can be conceived as nouns or events
modifiers (“beautiful dancer”), i. e. there is not a univocal relation between
word-class and syntactic function. 

In the editors’ words, this volume “offers the first broad pan-Romanic
discussion of the adjective adverb interface”. They make explicit that they
will only deal with the modal and the predicative function of those words, so
discussion will focus on these contexts, and not on the temporal and spatial
contexts, where  adjectives and adverbs interface (as in quantifiers).

The First Part (general aspects of adjective-adverb interface in Romance
languages) includes Chapters 1, 2 and 3:

In Chapter 1 (Hummel, M. “Adjective with adverbial functions in Romance”) the
author reflects about the adjectives with adverbial functions in Romance. He
uses the term ‘attribute modification’ to refer to the extra-linguistic
modification: as “red” in “the red house”, or “fast” in “he drives fast” (p.
17). In the following sections he itemises four types of adverbs, according to
their morphosyntax in the so-called ‘attribute modification’: Type A, using
adjectives for adverbial syntactic function  (It. “Gli uomini lavorano sodo”);
type B, adjective plus an adverbial morpheme with adverbial functions related
to written tradition (suffix “-mente”); type C, adverbial paraphrases (Sp. “a
solas”); and type D, lexicalized adverbs (Sp. “bien”). Of every kind, he
describes how they work, and also answers if this kind of adverbs is
preexisting in Latin. 

The last section of Chapter 1 is dedicated to the expansion of adverbs of type
A and B from attribute modification to peripheral functions, which seems to be
an important property of adverbs, and type B adverbs are the most productive
group, since they were created for literary purposes and are expanded to the
oral domain. On the other hand, the expansion is also directed to discursive
functions of different types, which seems to be another domain for type A and
B adverbs. His main conclusion is that type A adverbs should be considered a
word-class according to their morphology and syntax, opposite to type B
adverbs, which are more productive at present. Type C seems to be in
complementary distribution with type A adverbs and further investigation is
required. 

In Chapter 2 (Ledgeway, A. “Parameters in Romance adverb agreement”) the
author tries to determine the parameters acting in Romance adverb agreement.
He studies the cases where adjectives act as adverbs (syntactically) but some
agreement should exist. In order to establish these parameters, he starts
pointing out that there are four different patterns for adverb agreement in
the Romance languages, and he explains each one of them with examples of the
languages where they can be found (cf. tables in page 56, 60 and 65). In the
last two sections Ledgeway exposes the parameters he has found from a
generative perspective and he also establishes a hierarchy for them. These
parameters act in order and seem to follow a diachronic process of
application, based on the data of Spanish and French. According to this,
future work should include further research considering diachronic and
diatopic varieties which will help us understand the way this phenomenon acts
and why different patterns are present in Romance languages.

Chapter 3 (Cruschina, S. and Remberger E.-A. “Before the complementizer:
Adverb types and root clause modification”) focuses on the adverbs followed by
a clause, usually introduced by a conjunction. The authors classify languages
according to the way they produce adverbs introducing a clause (as It. “Certo
che potevamo impegnarci un po’ di più”):

1. Languages where neutral (deadjectival) adverbs introduce a clause: Italian
and Romanian, principally.
2. languages where both “mente” adverbs and neutral adverbs can introduce the
clause (Spanish).
3. languages where there are grammaticalised adverbs (formed by a introductory
word and the conjunction) introduce the clause (Romanian, Galician, Sicilian).

They study the way neutral adverbs act, and they propose that the clauses
introduced by these adverbs are dependent on an external sentence where the
verb is elided. In fact they determine that there can be pragmatic differences
when these neutral adverbs are clause external, and when the sentence is
independent and the adverb appears inside the predication. They think there
can have been grammaticalization processes, in which neutral adverbs (and
hearsay verbs and other words) merge with the conjunction and adopt a
pragmatic function. However, this diachronic process could not be the only way
these grammaticalised adverbs have risen, although it seems the simplest way.
They propose a further study on this kind of constructions, so the diachronic
and diatopic data can shed more light on the research.

Chapters 4 and 5 belong to the Second Part of the book, which is focused on
French. The first one (Abeillé, A., Bonami, O., Godard, D. and Noailly, M.
“Adjectives and adverbs in the Grande Grammaire du français”) is an exposition
of the morphosyntactic criteria that the Grande Grammaire (GG) du français has
established to distinguish adverbs and adjectives. The authors do a general
overview of French adverbs and adjectives, and also expose how the GG treats
these two categories, focusing especially on adverbs and adjectives, and the
tests the GG proposes to classify them. In the GG adjectives with adverbial
function are subclassified in two groups: those which allow agreement and
those which do not. To the last group belong neutral deadjectival adverbs.
Because they are classified as adjectives and not as adverbs, some of the
syntactic features of adverbs that do not fit this group are not applied to
them, and the categorization seems to work in a better way.

Chapter 5 (Van Raemdonck, D. “Are intrapredicative adjectives adverbs?”) asks
if the intrapredicative adjectives are adverbs. The author applies a model
which is part of the “genetic” approach to syntax. In it, the “incidence” of a
word is the scope of its modification (subject, object, principally in case of
adjectives as adverbs). The author focuses again on constructions where an
adjective inside the predication has a manner adverbial function, adding
information to a component of the sentence, which can be the object or any
other of its elements. Since the genetic approach is the one chosen to analyze
this phenomenon, concepts like incidence, determination and predication are
used. He studies six types of secondary predicates, and he shows that
parameters such as verb valency (the adjective is part of the valency frame of
the verb), or position of the adverb/adjective, determine the behaviour of
these adjectives. In the conclusions he asserts that adjectives with this
predicative function do carry the meaning, as adverbs do, but their
morphological features show that they are still adjectives, so they cannot be
considered adverbs. The only exception to this conclusion are sentences such
as “Pierre kiffe fort cette fille”, because such a use of adjectives are out
of agreement (cf. conclusion in page 162).

The Third Part of the book includes only the Sixth Chapter (Silvestri, G.
“Adverb agreement in the dialects of the Lusberg Area”), and it is focused on
Italian. This chapter studies some Southern Italian dialects which present
special morphological features for adverbs. These dialects have been mentioned
in previous chapters on the general aspects, because of the features that make
them so unique. In particular this chapter talks about adverb agreement, i.e.
the constructions where adverbial adjectives (or adjectival adverbs) present
agreement with the subject or the object of the sentence. In this case,
attention is paid to the predications where the agreement is possible and/or
compulsory. The author proposes that some verbal features allow the agreement,
some need it and some reject it. When agreement is possible but not
obligatory, a nuance of proximity to the nominal item with agreement is
indicated.

Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 belong to the Fourth Part, dedicated to Romanian.
Chapter 7 (Chircu, A. “Historical overview of the Romanian adverb”) is an
overview of Romanian adverbs along the history. Its content is exposed
diachronically, starting from Latin and arriving to the present. The
morphology of Romanian adverbs is important when facing the study of this
word-class in Romance, because they have morphological and syntactic features
unique in Romance languages. This article classifies adverbs according to
their formation and origin, and explains when mechanisms for adverb formation
were introduced in Romanian, if they are still productive and why they are or
not productive at the present time. Moreover, a list of examples is added to
every explanation, and for every example a clarification is included.

Chapter 8 (Vasile, C. M. and Croitor B. “Properties of Romanian adverbs and
adjectives from a categorial status perspective”) faces again the adjective
adverb interface in a modifying context, but in Romanian. It is a
comprehensive study of this phenomenon with data of different epochs, paying
attention to the syntactic content where these adjectival adverbs (or
adverbial adjectives) appear. The study includes deadjectival adverbs (inert
to agreement), adverbial adjectives and suffixed adverbs (the Romanian
counterparts of the Pan-romanic “mente” adverbs). The conclusion proposes that
the syntactic content is ambiguous to resolve if adverbs or adjectives are
required in most occasions. Semantics, however, can help decide, since some
adjectives cannot form adverbs and they can appear in some syntactic contexts
but not in all of them and the proximity to the noun can only be expressed by
adjectives.

Last Part focuses on Spanish. In Chapter 9 (Company Company, C. “Adverbial
adjectives and –mente adverbs face to face: Diachronic evidence from Spanish”)
Company tries to determine diachronically the distributional space of
adverbial adjectives and derivative adverbs in “mente”. She uses data from the
present and also from the 18th century. She studies five minimal pairs of
these two word-classes and she measures statistically the data she has
obtained from two corpora for Spanish, CORDE and CREA. She concludes that
“mente” adverbs are not marked but adverbial adjectives are, and the last ones
are more related to the verb, while the former can appear outside the
predication. She explains this difference in distribution arguing that
adverbial adjectives keep some of their adverbial “nature”, while “mente”
adverbs are external to the predication and it makes them keep close to the
verb (also their position is restricted to the postverbal scope). She resolves
that in Spanish there is completary distribution of these two kinds of
word-classes, which make them a stable category.

Chapter 10 (Medina Gómez, L. Y. and Alarcón Neve L. J. “Descriptive and
functional analysis of the solo-solamente adverbial pair in spoken Mexican
Spanish”) is a corpus study about the distribution of two Spanish adverbs
which are said to be synonyms: “solo” and “solamente”. To  do it, the authors
have selected two corpora of oral varieties of Spanish (Mexican Spanish), and
they have studied their syntactic, pragmatic and semantic distribution. They
have reached several conclusions which contribute to the discussion about
adjective and adverb interfaces, since the “solo” adverb is homonymous with
the adjective “solo” in masculine singular. The first conclusion is that
“solo” is more frequent, and that “solamente” is particularly frequent,
although it is a long word. The second conclusion is that they are synonyms in
most cases, and there are not distributional restrictions for “solo” or
“solamente”, although they found out slight differences in their pragmatic
use, that could grow in the future. At the end, they point out that there are
few cases where “solo” can be ambiguous (adjective or adverb), so the study of
these cases is a further question they would like to approach in order to
complete the work already done about “solo” and “solamente”.

Chapter 11 (Ortiz Ciscomani, R. M. “From adjective to adverbial modal
locutions in Spanish”) studies a particular construction which is not so
well-known: Spanish adverbial modal locutions formed by the preposition “a”
and an adjective in feminine plural, as e.g. “a ciegas” (it can also be formed
by an article in feminine plural, as in “a las buenas” and other variations).
The author has done a diachronic study of these locutions using corpora from
the 12th century until present and she shows the data extracted from these
corpora using statistics. She also dedicates a section of the chapter to the
state of the art and the origin of these locutions, and she makes her own
hypothesis about it. She exposes her conclusions from a cognitive perspective,
and she postulates that these locutions present some semantic restrictions
when choosing the adjective. A second conclusion she presents is that these
modal locutions emerged in the 15th century with an specific function: showing
expressive or subjective meaning. In this process, the prepositional phrase
becomes an independent unit with more abstract meaning occuring in particular
modal contexts, so she postulates it is an example of constructional
grammaticalization.

Last chapter (Suñer, A. “Adverbial adjectives and the decomposition of event
predicates”) brings us back to the topic of adverbial adjectives and
adjectival adverbs already handled in this volume. In this chapter this
phenomenon is studied principally from the Spanish and Catalan perspective,
but not only, since examples from French and Portuguese are also included. In
this occasion, the author proposes that the verbal features determine the
usage of adverbial adjectives with and without agreement with object or
subject. She divides the chapter according to the scope and interpretation of
these modifiers: inherent modification, eventive modification and durative
interpretation. Furthermore she dedicates a section to some difficult cases,
and also to contexts where adverbial adjectives and secondary predicates
interface. Her main conclusion is that these words should be considered
adjectives and not adverbs, although they can alternate with “mente” adverbs
in some contexts, and the fact that they do not present agreement is due to
the fact that they are outside a nominal scope.

It should be mentioned that every Chapter, and also the Introduction, has
their own bibliography section.

EVALUATION

The Introduction of the book presents the principal reasons that led the
editors to compile this volume. The presentation is clear and well argued, and
it makes the reader want to continue reading. No special background on Romance
languages is needed, since every sentence is translated in the book and in
some chapters examples are also glossed. The adjective adverb interface can be
easily understood by any linguistically educated reader, and the organization
of the book is very clear, so in case a reader is interested in one particular
language phenomenon explained in one chapter, it is not necessary to read
preceding chapters to understand it. 

It must also be noted that some authors reference other chapters  in their own
works. Authors address different issues but the most productive one is the
question of adjectival adverbs (or adverbial adjectives) as modifiers, which
is treated generally in Chapters One and Two, and particularly in French
(Chapter 5), Italian (Chapter Six), Romanian (Chapter Eight), and Spanish and
Catalan (Chapters 9 and 12). This issue seems to be the core issue of the
adjective adverb interface, as also the editors point out in Introduction, and
I wonder if it would not be possible to combine discussions, or at least
coordinate them, since there seems to be no agreement in the terminology the
researchers use, the patterns that condition this interface and, of course,
the answer to the  question of whether the forms are adverbs or adjectives.

Chapter One is dedicated to the general question about adjective and adverb
interfaces and the author gives a sociolinguistic explanation for the usage of
the different types of adverbs he proposes. This explanation is based on
different case studies, which are well documented in the references. It is,
however, lacking a comprehensive diachronic table or synopsis to follow the
expansion of the usage of type B adverbs to other domains, which could better
present the author’s assumption and explanation. 

Chapter Two is an exhaustive monographic article about the adjectival
agreement in adverb position in Romance. The chapter shows very interesting
data that illustrate different patterns present in this linguistic family, and
the overview of this phenomenon is complete. The observations about the splits
of patterns are very intriguing and show a clear process by which the
behaviour of adjectives changes in this function.  However, the generative
approach makes the third section difficult to understand  if the reader is not
familiar with the terminology, and she must pay very close attention in order
to follow the author’s reasoning.

Chapter Three is an interesting study of a Pan-romanic phenomenon which
combines syntax and pragmatics in a grammaticalization case. The examples used
by the authors are clear and useful in following their argumentation.
Furthermore, the inclusion of further pragmatic explanation (in some contexts
where it is needed) is certainly something to be grateful for, since the
reader may not be familiar with the languages of the examples, and sometimes
the pragmatic aspects are not easily understood by a non native speaker. The
argumentation is very clear and well structured, and, although the reader
might not be used to the generative approach, the conclusions do summarise 
the content very well.

Chapter Four is a review of the parts of the Grande Grammaire du Français
dedicated to adverbs and adjectives. Therefore, the compiling and summarising
effort done by the authors must be recognized, because the parameters exposed
are well structured and well summarised. However, the reader should be warned
about one thing: the neutral adverbs formed with no suffix from adjectives are
considered adjectives with no agreement. 

Chapter Five poses a question and tries to answer it by using the genetic
approach for syntax. The terminology to refer to syntactic functions is very
specific, and it can be very confusing. Some diagrams are included but they
are also quite unclear for non-initiated readers, so extra concentration is
need to master the specific concepts used along the chapter. However, the
author very satisfactorily answers the question raised in the title of the
chapter; the explanation of the phenomenon is clear and refers to syntactic
characteristics of predication, without introducing unfamiliar concepts and
other grammatical dimensions.
 
Chapter Six is a very clear exposition of  adverbial adjectives in Italian:
the author exposes data that are crucial to understand this phenomenon, and
the exposition helps the reader to understand a Pan-romanic issue, but the
question of terminology is not resolved.

Chapter Seven is a very good introduction to Romanian adverbs, and I found it
very useful when facing Chapter Eight, since it gives the history of these
words. The order of Chapters Seven and Eight is crucial for a reader who is
not a  Romanian specialist.

When facing again the question of adverbial adjectives in Chapter Eight and
the following chapters, readers can have the impression that the content of
the book is quite repetitive. The reader might wonder why the book is not
structured like this content, which is handled from several linguistic
perspectives. Chapter Eight sheds new light on the question of adverbial
adjectives by addressing the semantics of adjectives. Chapter 9 takes
diachrony into account when facing the adverbial adjectives in Spanish. These
factors could have been considered by the other authors handling this
phenomenon, so that there would be an identical approach to the adverbial
adjectives phenomenon, using data from different languages. 

The Part dedicated to Spanish, however, is very interesting since it also
includes articles for specific phenomena of Spanish: Chapter 10 isolates the
“solo” vs. “solamente” question, and the fact that the authors have not
included data for “solo” in ambiguous phrases makes me think that the
interfaces of both “solo” and “solamente” would be sufficient to fill a book,
and not a chapter of a book. In fact, including “solo” data as adjective would
have made this chapter longer than allowed. 

The interesting point of Chapter 11 is that the Spanish locutions studied (“a
solas”, “a las bravas”) are very particular and not so well studied from a
corpus linguistics perspective, so the content of this chapter exemplifies a
different kind of adjective-adverb interface beyond the adverbial adjectives
of chapters One, Two, Five, Six, Eight, Nine and Twelve.

To sum up, the structure of the book does not allow the reader to focus on the
main interface of adjectives and adverbs (adverbial adjectives); and it would
have been very interesting to structure the content of the book according to
the different phenomena caused by adjective and adverb interfaces. Although
readers can glean this information from different chapters, the approaches to
this specific interface (adverbial adjectives) are not consistent and do not
reference each other, so the information about factors and parameters acting
on one language cannot be applied to any other and data cannot be compared. 

Nevertheless, this book collects interesting phenomena about adjective adverb
interfaces, and all chapters include substantial data. The issue of these
interfaces seems not to be resolved, however; thus it would be interesting to
read a second volume where more languages are included and the question of
adverbial adjectives is handled by applying the same criteria to all
languages.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Berta González is a Postdoctoral Fellow Juan de la Cierva at the Universidad
Autónoma de Madrid. She holds a PhD in Classical Philology from the UCM, a BA
in Classical Philology from UCM and a BA in Italian Philology from the UV. Her
dissertation (2015) is entitled “Expresión de la Procedencia en lenguas
indoeuropeas antiguas: griego, latín e hitita”. She has worked as a researcher
at the Università Cattolica di Milano, in the Index Thomisticus Treebank
project, where she collaborated with Marco C. Passarotti annotating Latin
texts semantically and pragmatically. Apart from her work in Latin Linguistics
with the REGLA Project, she is still in contact with the Ido-European
Linguistics, as a member of two different projects in the UCM, “Estudio de
Morfosintaxis Nominal: lenguas paleohispánicas e indoeuropeas antiguas” and
“Relaciones lingüísticas y culturales entre Irán y el mundo clásico durante el
período del Imperio parto”. In addition to her work in Linguistics, Berta is
also interested in the study of female characters in Classical Literature.





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