Slovenian adverbial endings argue for a specific adverbial syntax

Abstract

The paper claims that the -o ending on Slovenian deadjectival adverbs is not a designated derivational morpheme for creating adverbs. Against the background of previous literature that questions the existence of adverbs as a category of its own (e.g. Bowers, 1975; Baker, 2003), the paper proposes that the actual source of Slovenian deadjectival adverbs is an adverbial reduced relative clause inside which regular predicative adjectives carry the neuter singular agreement morpheme, which is -o. The paper presents several arguments suggesting that adverbs indeed have a much richer syntactic structure than typically assumed.