The Layered Structure of Adverbs and their Orders in Persian

The aim of this paper is to investigate adverbs within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar. Testing the hypothesis of layered structure suggested for the adverbs in this theory, presenting ternary classification of nuclear, core and the clausal for them and explaining the reasons behind their order are the main goals of this study. What diversifies different approaches is the extent to which they allow meaning to determine the order for adverbs. The extent is the most in functionalism and the least in formalism in their extreme terms. Role and Reference Grammar which bridges these two extremes is considered the most qualified approach for the study of adverbs since it considers all the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects together for the analysis of different phenomena including adverbs and thus its viewpoint toward adverbs has been a model for us in this study.
In order to investigate this claim regarding Persian adverbs, attested data have been gathered from written and spoken sources and the order principle was checked against the sentences containing adverbs; so that the well-formedness level of sentences containing different adverbs was evaluated and the decrease in the well-formedness of sentences having the reordered version was judged to indicate the deviation from the seemingly basic order. Supporting the admission of the layered structure hypothesis for the adverbs, some complementary tests such as the sensitivity of nuclear adverbs to aspect, the ambiguity in interpretation for some core adverbs, different positions for various adverbs and their interpretation and finally the questionnaire and frequency test were used. Results from all of the tests have shown that Persian to a great extent follows the ordered principle suggested for adverbs in Role and Reference Grammar and the flexibility for the position of temporal adverbs and also of the adverbs within each layer do not question this as this theory itself has predicted them beforehand. Worth mentioning that order principle was observe red to hold for some of the adverbs in each layer such as between evidential and epistemic modal adverbs belonging to clause layer. This supports more the ordering hypothesis.
Besides, in this study different types of adverbs were recognized based on their interaction with operators. For nuclear adverbs, several number of aspectual adverbs were identified In Persian. What seem to be directional adverbs corresponding directional operators both in nucleus and core layer are either directional prefixes or argument adjuncts which the main predicate license them in the logical structure. And also the elements which seem to be negative adverbs which correspond with the negative operators in all of the three layers are actually negative polarity items in Persian since they always co-occur with negative operator. The event quantificational adverbs denote the times an event is happened which are considered as core adverbs. Also the adverbs which show deontic modality observed in Persian belong to core layer. Besides the adverbs which correspond to specific operators in the layers so far, there are adverbs belong to the layers without having a corresponding operator such as degree adverbs modifying the nucleus and manner and temporal-locative and also subject-oriented adverbs which modify the core layer. Finally we can point to epistemic modal and evidential adverbs as the main representatives for the clausal layer adverbs. The number for clausal adverbs, of course, will exceed if we add evaluative adverbs to them. Generally these were the main three classes of adverbs in Persian based on Role and Reference view on the adverb types. There are for sure some alternation between adverbs of different types and that’s why we can’t consider an absolute border between adverbs of different layers.
In conclusion, Persian adverbs, as predicted by Role and Reference Grammar, reveal layered structure and obey the ordering principle and therefore we can present a ternary classification of nuclear, core and clausal adverbs for them which supplements the traditional binary classification for them; which means that they modify predicate, predicate and its arguments and the whole proposition in respective.