Agreeing adverbs
Distribution
Clause-level agreeing adverbs have been observed in Romance varieties spoken in Italy and Spain and elsewhere (e.g., Antrim 1994 ; Fábregas & Pérez-Jiménez 2008; Ledgeway 2011, 2017; Hummel 2014, 2015, 2017; Hummel & Valera 2017; Silvestri 2017; Paciaroni 2023) and a number of Indo-Aryan varieties (e.g. Hook & Joshi 1991; Butt et al. 2016).
Agreeing adverbs are also particularly prevalent in the Nakh-Daghestanian family (e.g. Chumakina & Bond 2016; Chumakina & Lyutikova 2023; Sumbatova 2023; Kaye, in press), and are attested in the Samoyedic languages Tundra Nenets (Nikolaeva 2014) and Forest Enets (Khanina & Shluinsky 2023; Chumakina 2023).
The fact that adverb agreement is also observed sporadically across a number of different families, and only ever affects a subset of adverbs within a language, suggests that that there are likely to be further cases which are so far eluded attention.
Map 1.1 charts varieties known to have clause-level adverbs, as opposed to adverbs which are used as modifiers within a noun phrase. Adverbs that show agreement only when occurring as the modifiers of other modifiers have a different genetic and geographical distribution. The mapped data set is currently limited to those varieties included in Bond et al. (2022).
Map 1.1 Languages with adverb agreement included in Bond et al. (2022).
Data
| Variety | Genus | Sources |
|---|---|---|
| Aqusha Dargwa |  Dagestanian | van den Berg 1999; Ganenkov 2018 |
| Archi | Dagestanian | Kibrik 1977; Bond et al. 2016; Polinsky et al. 2017 |
| Avar | Dagestanian | Alekseev & Ataev 1998; Rudnev 2020 |
| Bagwalal | Dagestanian | Kibrik 2001 |
| Bats |  Nakh | Holisky & Gagua 1994; p.c. Jesse Wichers Schreur |
| Bezhta | Dagestanian | Comrie, Khalilov & Khalilova 2015 |
| Botlikh | Dagestanian | Saidova & Abusov 2012 |
| Bukusu |  Bantoid | Diercks 2010; Carstens & Diercks 2013 |
| Central Pashto |  Iranian | Tegey & Robson 1996; Brugman 2014; David & Goodman 2014; Fox & David 2014 |
| Chamalal | Dagestanian | Magomedova 1999 |
| Chechen | Nakh | Nichols 1994 |
| Cosentino |  Romance | Ledgeway 2009; Ledgeway 2011; Ledgeway 2017 |
| Forest Enets |  Samoyedic | Siegl 2011; Chumakina 2023; Khanina & Shluinsky 2023 |
| Gagatl Andi | Dagestanian | Salimov 2010 |
| Godoberi | Dagestanian | Saidova 1973; Kibrik 1995; Haspelmath 1999; Haspelmath 1996 |
| Gujarati |  Indo-Aryan | Hook & Joshi 1991; Cardona & Suthar 2003; Bhatt 2005 |
| Hinuq | Dagestanian | Forker 2013 |
| Hunzib | Dagestanian | van den Berg 1995 |
| Inkhokwari Khwarshi | Dagestanian | Khalilova 2009; Chumakina & Lyutikova 2023 |
| Lak | Dagestanian | Kazenin 2013 |
| Marathi | Indo-Aryan | Pandharipande 2003; Dhongde & Wali 2009 |
| Marwari | Indo-Aryan | Magier 1983; Gusain 2004 |
| Moseten |  Mosetén-Chimané | Sakel 2004 |
| Mussomeli | Romance | Ledgeway 2011; Ledgeway 2017 |
| Northern Akhwakh | Dagestanian | Creissels 2012; Creissels 2018 |
| Ripano | Romance | Paciaroni & Loporcaro 2018; Lopocaro et al. 2020; Paciaroni 2023; D'Alessandro 2020 |
| Southern Akhwakh | Dagestanian | Muraviev, forthcoming |
| Tanti Dargwa | Dagestanian | Sumbatova & Lander 2014; Sumbatova 2023; p.c. Nina Sumbatova |
| Tindi | Dagestanian | Magomedova 2003 |
| Tokita | Dagestanian | Magomedbekova 1971; Magomedova & Khalidova 2001 |
| Tsakhur | Dagestanian | Ibragimov 1990; Kibrik 1999a ; Kibrik 1999b; Kazenin & Testelets 1999 |
| Tsez | Dagestanian | Polinsky 2015 |
| Tundra Nenets | Samoyedic | Nikolaeva 2014 |
| Urdu | Indo-Aryan | Bhatt 2005; Kachru 2006 ; Shapiro 2013; Butt et al. 2016 |
| Zilo Andi | Dagestanian | Kaye 2023; Kaye, in press; Kaye et al., in press |
References
Antrim, Nancy Mae. 1994. ‘Italian adverbial agreement’, in Michael L. Mazzola (ed.), Issues and theory in Romance linguistics: Selected papers from the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages XXIII, April 1–4, 1993. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 129–40.
Bond, Oliver, Steven Kaye & Marina Chumakina. 2022. A typology of agreement targets. Paper given at the 55th Societas Linguistica Europaea meeting (SLE 55), University of Bucharest, August 26, 2022.
Butt, Miriam, Sebastian Sulger, Mutee U. Rahman, & Tafseer Ahmed. 2016. ‘Adverb agreement in Urdu, Sindhi and Punjabi’, in Doug Arnold, Miriam Butt, Berthold Crysmann, Tracy Holloway King, & Stefan Müller (eds), Proceedings of the Joint 2016 Conference on Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Lexical Functional Grammar. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 140–60.
Chumakina, Marina. 2023. ‘Agreeing adverbs in Enets’, in Marina Chumakina, Oliver Bond & Steven Kaye (eds), Agreement beyond the verb. Unusual targets, unexpected domains, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 132–155.
Chumakina, Marina & Oliver Bond. 2016. ‘Competing controllers and agreement potential’, in Oliver Bond, Greville G. Corbett, Marina Chumakina & Dunstan Brown (eds.), Archi: Complexities of agreement in cross-theoretical perspective, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 77-117.
Chumakina, Marina & Ekaterina Lyutikova. 2023. ‘External agreement in Khwarshi’, in Marina Chumakina, Oliver Bond & Steven Kaye (eds), Agreement beyond the verb. Unusual targets, unexpected domains, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 198-242.
Fábregas, Antonio, & Isabel Pérez-Jiménez. 2008. ‘Gender agreement on adverbs in Spanish’, Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 7/2: 25–45.
Hook, Peter, & Dayashankar Joshi. 1991. ‘Concordant adverbs and postpositions in Gujarati’, Indian Linguistics, 52: 1–14.
Hummel, Martin. 2014. ‘Adjetivos adverbiales’ [Adverbial adjectives], in Concepción Company Company (ed.), Sintaxis histórica de la lengua española. Tercera parte [Historical syntax of Spanish, part 3]. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Fondo de Cultura Económica, 613–732.
Hummel, Martin. 2015. ‘Los adverbios flexionados’ [Inflected adverbs], in Carmen Galán Rodríguez, María L. Montero Curiel, José C. Martín Camacho, & María I. Rodríguez Ponce (eds), El discurso de la gramática [The discourse of grammar]. Cáceres: Universidad de Extremadura, 205–33.
Hummel, Martin. 2017. ‘Adjectives with adverbial functions in Romance’, in Martin Hummel & Salvador Valera (eds), Adjective adverb interfaces in Romance. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 13–46.
Hummel, Martin, & Salvador Valera (eds). 2017. Adjective adverb interfaces in Romance. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Kaye, Steven. In press. ‘Clausal agreement on adverbs in Andi’, Linguistics.
Khanina, Olesya, & Andrey Shluinsky. 2023. ‘Enets’, in Daniel Abondolo & Riitta-Liisa Valijärvi (eds), The Uralic languages (2nd ed.). London; New York: Routledge, 793–852.
Ledgeway, Adam. 2011. ‘Adverb agreement and split intransitivity: Evidence from southern Italy’, Archivio Glottologico Italiano, 96/1: 31–66.
Ledgeway, Adam. 2017. ‘Parameters in Romance adverb agreement’, in Martin Hummel & Salvador Valera (eds), Adjective adverb interfaces in Romance. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 47–80.
Nikolaeva, Irina. 2014. A grammar of Tundra Nenets. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Paciaroni, Tania. 2023. ‘Unusual agreement targets in Ripano’, in Marina Chumakina, Oliver Bond & Steven Kaye (eds), Agreement beyond the verb. Unusual targets, unexpected domains, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 156–197.
Silvestri, Giuseppina. 2017. ‘Adverb agreement in the dialects of the Lausberg Area’, in Martin Hummel & Salvador Valera (eds), Adjective adverb interfaces in Romance. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 173–204.
Sumbatova, Nina. 2023. ‘Agreement of essive adverbials in Tanti Dargwa, in Marina Chumakina, Oliver Bond & Steven Kaye (eds), Agreement beyond the verb. Unusual targets, unexpected domains, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 91-131.