Abstract

Adverbs were first proposed as a class of words by the ancient Greek grammarians based on two distinctive features: their morphological invariability (ákliton ‘without inflection’) and their semantic and syntactic association with the verb, as is signified by their name: epírrēma ‘attached to the verb’ (translated into Latin as aduerbium). However, no common semantic, morphological, or syntactic features have been identified for all the terms traditionally cla…