Verbal agreement?

we.NOM did.VB (it (last week).ACC).ACC

Do adverbs in these languages possess cases in general? What if you inflect it for dative (indirect object)?

I haven't figured out much more at this point, but I did notice an interesting overlap:

"anchatam" is a frequent word meaning "a lot":
anchatam paran
ancha-ta-m para-n
much-ACC-EVID rain-3SG
'It's raining a lot / heavily'

In this particular case it's easy to see an overlap (in English too) for adverbs and direct objects. Is the raining action done to "a lot [of rain]"? If adjectives and nouns are sometimes ambiguous, then this pattern of grammaticalization might make some sense. Then by analogy it becomes the main marker of adverbs.

True! But then doesn't the question become the following -- "Why are verbal modifiers and verbal objects equivalent in these languages?"

I don't have enough of a sense for Quechua yet to answer such a precise question. You may be right. But for Arabic at least, I do get the impression there's a distinction between objects and adverbs. Adverbs, for example, almost always go at the end of a sentence, while objects are almost always close to the verb. It's possible that the situation was different earlier in the language and now they're distinct but once were the same function. But I still wonder exactly how that happened.

Another issue for Quechua would be that I assume you can have doubling with adverbs and transitive verbs:
I like the cow a lot.
(I can check the grammaticality of that later if it seems relevant.)
And there would be no additional marker of valency, meaning that the adverbs are not arguments/complements of the verbs. They're just adjuncts. And why would adjuncts be overtly marked as if they were complements?

But position within a sentence is insufficient to define the autonomy of a word class.

It shows that there is some difference between them. The fact that they share an ending is equally insufficient to show they are the same word class

I don't think you can do this for Quechua. I suppose the only grammatical sentence would be "I very much like the cow".

Hm? Do you mean word order? I just meant that you could have much+TA and OBJ+TA in the same sentence. So two direct objects, if they're supposed to be the same function.

I mean, that I don't believe Quechua will object MUCH+TA in that construction. It will have something like 'I very much like that cow-TA' but not '... like that cow-TA very much-TA' or 'like that cow-TA very-TA much-TA'.

It will. I've seen sentences like that, I believe, but I'll try to confirm it when I have a chance to ask my instructor. The phrase "very much" you refer to is specifically "ancha-ta". You could argue it is no longer transparent. Perhaps it originated in intransitives. But now it's used for everything.

Maybe this is like secondary markers of negation as in French "ne V pas", where "pas" must have originally be licensed as an object, but now doesn't interfere with transitives?


In Arabic, you can have an adverb and a direct object (marked the same way) in a sentence. Or multiple adverbs.
In Quechua I believe the same is true, but I can confirm.

Discussed this in class today (for Quechua):

1. It's fine to have an adverb and a direct object in the same sentence.
2. -ta is the regular suffix for forming adverbs from adjectives. There are other ways to form adverbs, but this is the main way from adjectives. And it may not work on every adjective, but it works on most (so it's productive).
3. It's fine to use these adverbs with intransitive verbs. (Note that in Quechua there's no zero-derivation between classes, transitivity, etc.-- "walk" is intransitive and to "walk a dog" you would need to add a causative suffix, etc.)
4. It's "basically the same as English -ly", according to my teacher.


Another example is:
sumaq-ta
good-ACC
'well'

This hints at an origin in phrases like "do good [things]" resulting in an eventual adverbial meaning.

So my guess, and just a guess, is that this usage started out in ambiguous contexts:
I do a lot = anchata
I do good (things) = sumaqta
Are those objects? Adverbs?

Then after these started to be used idiomatically, by analogy the suffix was generalized. This isn't so unlike English -ly, which was a suffix used to form some adjectives, eventually used as adverbs in some cases, then generalized and systematized.

There is an interesting implication here that adverb suffixes are somehow inflectional, rather than derivational. I've always thought that. There are some arguments out there against that for English -ly, but overall I think it's a better analysis than thinking it's mostly derivational. And here's another hint.
(More reasonably, there is no perfect distinction, and this is an example of a suffix somewhere in the middle, though I'd say mostly inflectional.)