The Indo-European Adverb in diachronic and typological perspective

The aim of the present paper is twofold: 1) to define some controversial aspects concerning the notion of “adverbiality” both from a formal and a conceptual viewpoint; 2) to apply the results of such an analysis to the oldest stages of some Indo-European languages within the framework of the so-called “dynamic typology”. To sum up, at the moment data basically confirm our original hypothesis and one of the issues we had decided to test in our previous paper (Putzu / Ramat, in press, § 2.4): an intrinsic relation between the typological indexes of synthesis and fusion exists which is aligned with the crisis of the inflectional morphology of cases in the nominal system. Side by side, productive processes of new adverbial formations start being observed. This corresponds to what we underlined at the end of the first part of this paper, i.e. there is a drift of many linguistic traditions from the synthetic type to the analytical, more diagrammatic type.