Agreeing adverbs in Enets

Abstract

Abstract In Enets (Uralic; Siberia) agreeing adverbs form a closed subclass, with members that can be traced back to frozen case forms of nouns. These adverbs, however, have lost all grammatical properties of nominals, and their etymology is not always transparent. All agreeing adverbs in Enets are controlled by the subject, but the morphology used for agreement is not verbal in origin. Rather, it developed from a paradigm of possessive affixes found on present-day nouns and some non-finite verbal forms. In the Enets variety known as Forest Enets, adverbs retain the possibility of agreement even if the verb does not. This behaviour differs from that seen in the related language Tundra Nenets, where agreement on agent-oriented adverbs resembles concord in the verbal domain. Such adverbs can only host agreement in the presence of agreement on the verb, and adverbial agreement is impossible in dependent clauses headed by converbs which do not show agreement themselves.