Project description "The Third Way"

While research on adverbs in Romance traditionally focusses on adverbs ending in –ment(e) (e.g. Fr. durement ‘toughly’) and, secondarily, on adverbial adjectives (e.g. Fr. travailler dur ‘to work hard’), prepositional phrases such as Fr. à la dure ‘to do sth. the hard way’ or Sp. de seguro ‘certainly’ have been neglected by manuals, grammars and linguistic studies. Most linguistic studies dealing with the pattern “preposition + adjective” (PA-pattern) suggest analyses in terms of adverbial locutions, that is, lexicalized phrases. From the point of view of present-day standard, this analysis is basically justified. However, the diachronic perspective foregrounds productivity and usage as an alternative to adverbs in –ment(e) or adverbial adjectives. The project therefore tackles this striking fact. Taking Old and Golden Age Spanish under scrutiny, Hummel (2012) finds not less than 57 series such as continuo (adv.), continuamente, de continuo, a la continua.

The main hypothesis of the project claims that PA adverbials were a productive third way of creating adverbials, i.e. the most relevant analytic solution in the Latin-Romance transition (besides the well-known path Lat. sola mente > solamente). The third way splits into two paths. The first one belongs to the spoken common language (e.g. Fr. à la dure, Sp. a las buenas). The second one develops in the written tradition (de subito, de ordinario). They productively coexisted with adverbial adjectives and adverbs in –mente, roughly speaking until the 17th century.

The examination of the PA-pattern in the Latin-Romance transition at the interface of orality and literacy is highly relevant for linguistic research. With regard to linguistic theory, the results will be crucial for (i) typological considerations, (ii) the interface of oral and written traditions, (iii) the impact of PA adverbials on the diachrony of adverbials in general, and (iv) the replacement of synthetic structures by analytic ones in the Latin-Romance transition.

For this purpose, the project formulates 7 research issues. One of these concerns the diachrony of PA adverbials in Latin. Several authors take the pattern as an innovation in Romance, but spot checks provide evidence for its presence in Latin. Two issues concern the Latin-Romance transition examined using three methods: diachronic evidence in written texts, diachronic reconstruction from Medieval Romance, Latin-Romance translations. Two issues concern the usage until the end of the 16th century and from the 17th century until today. First analyses indeed suggest that 17th century purism and subsequent standardization were responsible for the marginalization of PA adverbials and their present-day status as lexicalized remnants of former productive usage.

Finally, the project will provide new data for the Open Access Database and benefit from synergies with the OA-Database-Project. The project is co-supervised by three international partners: Adam Ledgeway (Cambridge), Jairo García Sánchez (Alcalá de Henares), Adrian Chircu (Cluj-Napoca).

At the moment the team conducts and has conducted field work in various regions in collaboration with international partners, in order to sort out which variants of the P+A adverbials are still in use in different Romance languages and  varieties.

• Spain (province of Granada): David Porcel Bueno (April and October 2019)
• Mexico (Mexico DF): Martin Hummel, Rodrigo Flores and Miriam Reyes (November 2019 – February 2020)
• Italy (Campania): Stefan Koch and Cesarina Vecchia (July/August 2020)
• Canada (Quebec): Inka Wissner (Spring 2022)
• Brasil A (Rio de Janeiro): Martin Hummel, Priscilla Mouta and Deise Moraes (posponed due to Covid)
• Brasil B (Salvador de Bahía): David Porcel Bueno and Javier Salcedo Martín (february and september 2020)

Furthermore, the project profits from the cooperation with another FWF (= Austrian Science Fund) funded project, the Open Access Database „Adjective-Adverb Interfaces in Romance“, which fosters data for corpus based investigations on prepositional adverbials compared to adjective-adverbs and –mente-adverbs.