Adverbial categories

Adverbs are a very problematic category with respect to both their notional internal consistency and their status as an open lexical class on their own. After some considerations on the non-prototypical nature of adverb formation, notoriously on the border between inflection and derivation, the present article starts by characterizing the features of a central procedure within the domain, namely the deadjectival manner adverb. It then gives a cross-linguistic illustration of the main extensions related to this formation procedure and further proceeds to discuss other well-represented instances of productive adverbializing morphology, to end with some brief diachronic considerations.