Adverb production by affixation in the Ulch language (Comparing Nanai and Orok)

The paper examines the patterns of adverb formation by affixation in the Ulch language. The aim is to identify the range of grammatical types of stems and suffixes used in the patterns as well as the change in meaning triggered by the derivation process for each pattern. The tokens for analysis were selected by continuous sampling from Ulch dictionaries and glossaries found in published studies on the Ulch language. The total of about 200 ‘producing stem + derivate’ pairs were selected and further processed using component, comparative and qualitative analysis. As a result, about twenty patterns were discovered including verbtoadverb, adjectivetoadverb, nountoadverb, adverbbased and numeraltoadverb patterns. Some of the patterns were found to operate identical suffixes that display an ability to combine with stems belonging to various parts of speech. This turns out a distinguishing feature of the Ulch grammatical system we previously documented for noun and adjective production. The characteristic feature of the adverb production is the lack of a strict border between affix and nonaffix patterns making itself evident by such phenomena as (i) the use of derivational suffixes possibly originating from inflectional affixes figuring in the forms that underwent conversion, (ii) the use of mixed methods (reduplication combined with affixation).