Juxtaposed adjunct clauses in Otomi: Expressing both depictive and adverbial semantics

Abstract

In this article, I study the grammatical expression of "depictive" content (Schultze-Berndt and Himmelmann 2004) ('he arrived drunk') and adverbial content ('he arrived well') in Otomi. I show that speakers of this Mesoamerican language encode both depictive and adverbial content by means of juxtaposed adjunct clauses. While this structure is widely and productively used to express depictive semantics, it shows a number of distributional restrictions when encoding several other notions including manner, extent, and time, which are generally expressed by means of adverbs. I claim that a substantial number of such adverbs emerged as the lexicalized outcome of former verbs functioning as predicates in adverbial clauses. © 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.