Nominal adverbials with temporal semantics in Hill Mari

Polina Pleshak¹, Dmitry Petelin^2
1University of Maryland / ²Lomonosov Moscow State University

Abstract. This paper explores the syntax of Hill Mari nominal adverbials with temporal semantics. While these adverbials have the general distribution of adverbs, they can also be used as NPs in argument positions. However, the search for the NP licensor becomes problematic as some temporal adverbials in Hill Mari seem to be “bare” nominals while others seem to be marked with the structural accusative. In this paper we show that both types of adverbials demonstrate syntactic properties of PPs. The proposed analysis of the adverbials with temporal semantics as PPs makes possible to treat both “bare” and accusative-marked temporal expressions uniformly.

Keywords: temporal expressions, nominal adverbials, case, Hill Mari

For citation: Pleshak P., Petelin D. Nominal adverbials with temporal semantics in Hill Mari. Typology of Morphosyntactic Parameters. 2019. Vol. 2, iss. 2. Pp. 95–112.