Saturday, November 15, 2014

Detail #121: Adverbs as Complements

Imagine a language where adverbs generally are seen either as a complement of the subject (i.e., complements as in 'I am angry', 'I turned weak', etc, but generalized so any verb can have it - 'I walked quick' (where quick describes 'me', rather than 'walked') rather than 'I walked quickly', 'I fought convinced') or the object (as in the type of complement you get in 'I painted my house red'). Now, let's do this by having the adverbs agree with their subject or object in case and or gender.

Now, obviously, some adverbs don't necessarily have any clear semantic connection to either subject or object - 'he definitely knows our plan', 'regrettably, I cannot tell you this secret'. Thus, the language gets a lot of lexicalized information with each adverb-like thing as to whether they agree with the subject or the object. In the case of intransitive sentences, though, they all agree with the subject. (Alternatively, they agree with some default gender/case?) (Actually, this could be a place to insert some split-ergativity!)

Of course, even locative expressions that are not core arguments of the verb could go for some congruence-thing like this.

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