Manner Adverbs

[l.m.h. stassen]

Dear colleagues,


I need your help. Over the last year, my Ph.D. student Floor Loeb and I have
been trying to set up a data base about (what we still loosely call) "manner
adverb encoding", and we have found that this is the sort of data that even
pretty good grammars usually fail to mention. So now I ask you to take five
to ten minutes to answer the following question: how does, in the
language(s) that you are familiar with, a sentence like "The girl/she sang
beautifully" look like? Obviously, it's the "beautifully" part that we're
interested in, but we'd appreciate it if you could provide us with the full
sentence nonetheless. Also, any comment on the formal encoding of the
equivalent of "beautifully" would be most welcome (e.g. , is this an
adjective in a certain case? Does the item have an affix that has other
functions in the language, either historically or diachronically? Is this a
with-phrase with a nominalized item, as in "with beauty"? Or anything else
you might want to mention as a matter of interest). But please don't feel
that you can't answer this query if you don't have any real analysis to
provide: just the data will be extremely useful for us now.
   It's probably not a good idea to burden our Lingtyp List with the answers
to this query. Please send your reactions to
      l.stassen at let.kun.nl
I will be happy to post a summary on this list. I'm afraid I can only give
you Dutch (and some of its dialects) in return, but I hereby solemnly swear
that I'll be ready to return the favour anytime you ask.

Leon Stassen
Dept.of Linguistics (ATD), KU Nijmegen
Erasmusplein 1
6525 GG Nijmegen                        fax   : +31-24-3615939
The Netherlands                         e-mail: l.stassen at let.kun.nl