Verbs or Aderbs in Thao

Abstract

One may expect that concepts, such as ‘all’, ‘only’, ‘again’, ‘very’, ‘first’, ‘next’, and ‘tomorrow’, are adverbs or nouns, yet they all behave like verbs in Thao. Are there any genuine adverbs at all in Thao? There must be at least a few. For example, the form mani ‘also’ is always invariable and its occurrence in a sentence is relatively free. Similarly, the form maʃna ‘even’ is also invariable and it usually occurs before a noun or subject of a clause. The same is true of the time word tiɬa ‘yesterday’. The same or very similar phenomena may also be found in other Formosan languages. It is interesting to see how similar or dissimilar the adverbial verbs and adverbs in Thao behave in other languages. I have compared them to those in a closely related language, Favorlang, in this paper.