• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.115-121
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• 2020

The primary aim of this paper is to discuss the historical development or grammaticalization of English adverbial -ly suffix and provide a diachronic analysis of manner adverbs and sentence adverbs from the perspective of secondary grammaticalization. The grammaticalization includes both the primary grammaticalization from a lexical to a grammatical and the secondary grammaticalization from a less grammatical to a more grammatical status. The emergence of the manner adverbs is due to the primary grammaticalization from OE adjectival suffix -lic to ME adverbial suffix -ly. In contrast, the emergence of sentence adverbs is due to the secondary grammaticalization from manner adverbs in VP domain to sentence adverbs in TP domain with grammatical features of tense and modality. This paper concludes that the secondary grammaticalization of the English adverbial -ly suffix includes the change from manner adverbs to sentence adverbs which obtain a new grammatical function of tense and modality.