Relative prevalence of agreeing adverbs

Relative prevalence

Given that adverb agreement is relatively rare, our starting point for investigating the relative prevalence of agreeing adverbs is not a stratified sample of the world’s languages, but a sample containing languages known to show agreement on at least one non-verbal agreement target.

Map 1.2 shows the distribution of languages with clause-level adverb agreement within a convenience sample of 73 languages used in Bond et al. (2022). The sample was constructed for the purpose of exploring dependencies between target types in languages exhibiting evidence for at least one non-verbal agreement target belonging to the categories adverb, adposition, complementizer, noun or pronoun. The goal of the sample was to explore whether the presence of one type of non-verbal agreeing target is a good predictor or prerequisite of another.

The sample is highly biased in terms of areal coverage and the genetic affiliation of the languages included, and cannot be used to accurately quantify the prevalence of adverb agreement in general terms. However, the raw numbers show that, within the sample, adverb agreement (35 out of 73 varieties) is about as common as adposition agreement (42 out of 73 varieties) in systems characterised by the presence of agreement on non-verbal agreement targets.