Persian Adverbs of Manner Revisited

The present article investigates the Persian so-called manner adverbs within the Davidsonian event semantics framework aiming at providing a more precise and comprehensive grouping for these adverbs. This category can be divided into two groups of manner and state adverbs. Manner adverbs are event-oriented, i.e. they modify the process of the event. State adverbs are participant-oriented, i.e. they modify the state of the agent or the theme during an event. Manner adverbs are divided into three categories of agent-oriented, resultative and pure manner adverbs. Agent-oriented adverbs modify the subevent of process and the agent; resultative adverbs modify the process and the result state of the event, and pure manner adverbs modify only the process of an event. State adverbs are divided into two subgroups of static depictive and dynamic depictive adverbs. Static depictive adverbs modify the state of the agent or theme during the event, and dynamic depictive adverbs mention the other action done by the agent, simultaneously. Therefore, state adverbs are the modifiers of agents and themes, which are noun phrases and as a result, contrary to the common view, adverbs can be noun modifiers. The only productive adverbial suffix of Persian is "-Ane". It attaches to some nouns and also adjectives which are not able to participate in an event structure, and makes agent-oriented adverbs out of them. The other state and manner adverbs are expressed by adjectives or preposition phrases. Consequently, the current classification of Persian manner adverbs is not accurate. The members of this group are very diverse and need to be treated differently.