R: Manner Adverbs

[Paolo Ramat]

Dear Leon,
for EUROTYP vol.IV (Adverbial Constructions in the Lgs. of Eur., ed. by J.
v.d.Auwera, to be published in short) Davide Ricca and I prepared a chapter
on "sentence Adverbs in the Lgs. of Eur." sending around a questionnaire
with sentences that contain also manner adverbs like <Wisely, he answered
the soldiers' questions f o o l i s h l y  when he was captured>, and
oppositions like <Kindly, he answered my letter> vs <He answered k i n d l y
my letter>.  We have data, provided by native speakers and not drawn from
grammars, for 41 Eur.lgs. Another, more general, article on the category ADV
has been published by P.Ramat and D. Ricca in "Rivista di Linguistica"
6/1994:289-326 ("Prototypical adverbs:on the scalarity/radiality of the
notion of ADVERB").
As for your particular query The girl sang beautifully:
The Ital. transl. is "La ragazza cantò bene" (not *bellamente, which would
be the literal transl. of beautifully: some manner ADVs do not show
the -mente morpheme, you find e.g. in "La ragazza cantò splendidamente,
incantevolmente, dolcemente, etc. etc."). "With-constructions": you may have
"La rag. cantò con passione, con trasporto, con dolcezza etc." Not all these
subst.s have an adverbial equivalent:
??appassionatamente, *trasportamente, but dolcemente is OK. It's a matter of
idiosyncratic properties of lexical entries.
See you on Friday.   Paolo
-----Messaggio originale-----
Da: l.m.h. stassen <l.stassen at LET.KUN.NL>
A: LINGTYP at LINGUIST.LDC.UPENN.EDU <LINGTYP at LINGUIST.LDC.UPENN.EDU>
Data: venerdì 13 marzo 1998 1.14
Oggetto: Manner Adverbs


>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
>