A Comparative Study of Manner Adverbials in English and Urdu: Analyzing (-ly) and (-se) Adverbs through Functional-Typological Approach

Abstract

Adverbs play an important role in linguistic structures of different languages as they modify adjectives, verbs or entire clauses to express nuances of manner, time, place or degree. The formation of adverbs relies predominantly on the addition of a suffix, in English and other languages which serves the role of inflectional or derivational marker. When suffixes are attached to the adjectival bases, they mostly encode manner adverbials. The synthesis of this research aims to gain comparative insights into the manner adverbials in English and Urdu language specifically adverbs that end at -ly in English and -se in Urdu. The analysis of this qualitative study has been driven by the integration of Functional-Typological Approach in morphology. The sample includes sufficient number of adverbs of manner of both languages i.e. English and Urdu which ends at -ly and -se respectively. The data has been collected by using documented sentences from newspapers and through the emic approach. The implication of Functional-Typological framework reveals how morphological strategies shape the functional roles, lexical attachments and productivity of adverbial expressions. Moreover, the findings also exposed that whether -ly and -se are functionally equivalent or not. However, this study presents a detailed explication of formation of manner adverbials in English and Urdu morphology to illustrate the comparative patterns. Ultimately, the findings mainly reveal that -ly in English and -se in Urdu both prioritize manner adverbials through adjectival bases. Yet their role as a suffix and postpositional attachments respectively constructs morphological realization which yield distinct structural typologies but similar functional roles.