The Second Way: Prepositional Adverbials in Primary Dialects

The project The Second Way: Prepositional Adverbials in Primary Dialects of Romance builds upon the project The Third Way: Prepositional Adverbials from Latin to Romance.. The predecessor project examined prepositional adverbials (Type C), e.g., Fr. à la dure, Sp. a la ligera (cf. Eng. in short), as a significant third way of adverbial formation, alongside adverbial adjectives, e.g., Fr. aller direct, Sp. hablar claro (Type A) (cf. Eng. to speak clear), and derived adverbs ending in -mente, e.g., Fr. directement, Sp. tranquilamente (Type B) (cf. Eng. to speak clearly). The present project specifically focuses on the primary dialects of the Romance- speaking world. Primary dialects are varieties that descend directly from Latin, unlike Spanish in America, which stems from an already established Romance language. Since Type B, which spread through standardization, is absent in the primary dialects of Romance, these dialects preserve the Indo-European tradition of the adverbial use of adjectives (Type A) and extend it to Type C. Therefore, Type C in primary dialects should not be considered a third way but rather a second way of adverb formation. Consequently, this project is aptly named "The Second Way." The project aims to analyse the functional differentiation between adverbials of Type A and Type C. The central hypothesis of the project suggests that Type C expands the direct modification of the verb in Type A (e.g., Fr. courir léger `to run nimbly`) by adding semantic- pragmatic features, such as the speaker`s attitude, as in Fr. à la légère `carelessly, thoughtlessly.` The project stands out for its innovative focus on the largely overlooked prepositional adverbials of Type C within a pan-Romance comparative study. It investigates seven contemporary primary dialects in five areas of Romance: Gallo-Romance (Evolène, Franco- Provençal), Italo-Romance (Montellese and Verbicarese, southern Italian varieties), Ibero- Romance (Mirandese and Asturian), and Daco-Romanian (Banaean and Criean). The project employs a field research method developed and refined within the framework of The Third Way project which now also includes the functional differentiation of Type A. This method is based on questionnaires, with ten interviews conducted per dialect, each involving two informants. The research team consists of four postdoctoral researchers: Stefan Koch (Italo- Romance and project management), Inka Wissner (Gallo-Romance), David Porcel Bueno (Ibero-Romance), and Adrian Chircu (Daco-Romanian). The project is led by Martin Hummel (University of Graz).