Nahuatl Digest, Vol 278, Issue 1

[Magnus Pharao Hansen]

Listeros

In most of the examples you give of "adverbial nouns" the noun is not an
adverb but simply a secondary/indirect object which is not marked on the
verb because of the fact that Nahuatl verbs can only mark one object with
an explicit/definite referent and one with an indefinite or unreferenceable
object. In those cases the traditional analyses simply analyses the
suppressed argument as being marked with a zero morpheme. This is exactly
the phenomenon I presented on at Yale two years ago.

Nouns may be used adverbially in classical Nahuatl through the use of the
"ic" particle and through the locative endings and as an incorporated
modifier but I would be very reluctant to propose the analyses that you are
arguing here without having first taken into account the details of the
traditional analyses of Nahuatl transitivity. As I also argued two years
ago at Yale, many modern Nahuatl varieties use the Spanish loan particle "*
de*" (or *tlen *in La Huasteca) to adjoin oblique arguments in this way.
Hill & Hill 1986 argued that the phrases beginning with "de" were
advberbial, but in 95% of the examples I have seen the verb does not in
fact license a second argument and that analysis fails.

best,

-- 
Magnus Pharao Hansen
PhD. student
Department of Anthropology

Brown University
128 Hope St.
Providence, RI 02906

*magnus_pharao_hansen at brown.edu*
US: 001 401 651 8413
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