Adverbial

An adverbial adjunct, or simply adverbial, is a phrase that adds more information to a clause. They are created by placing the hiatus tone hiatus tone on a verb. For example, 󱚷󱛌󱚹 󱚺󱛊󱛃󱛍󱚺󱛂 (tî sóaq) "in the garden" and 󱚴󱛌󱛃󱛎󱚹 (fôı) "boredly" are adverbials.

Sometimes these are just called adverbs. Technically, "adverbial (adjunct)" refers to an entire constituent like "in the garden" or "very quickly", and "adverb" to a single word like "quickly".

Types of adverbial

Syntactically, adverbials may or may not take a noun form complement, depending on if the verb is transitive or intransitive.

  • is transitive, so it needs a complement — here sóaq — effectively making act like a preposition.
  • Fôı is intransitive, so it doesn't need a complement, making it act like an adverb.

Semantically, adverbials are split into two categories based on whether the verb being conjugated can have an event as its subject.

  • can have an event subject, so it creates an eventive adverbial: Sea jí tî sóaq means "I rest, and this event is in the garden."
  • Fôı can't have an event subject, so it creates a subject-sharing adverbial: Sea jí fôı means "I rest, and concurrently I am bored."

Positions

Adverbials may occur in three positions:

  1. Before the cleft verb , for example Tî sóaq nä pıe jí sá kafe.
  2. Before the arguments, for example Pıe tî sóaq jí sá kafe.
  3. After the arguments, for example Pıe jí sá kafe tî sóaq.

See also