Defining the Concept of Manner: An Attempt to Order Chaos

Abstract

The concept of manner is extensively used in many fields of linguistics. It alo appears to ordinary speakers, students and grammarians as an intuitively clear and meaninful notion that does not need any precise definition. Some scholars even claim that manner belongs to a limited set of primitive semantic categoeris that cannot be further broken down into more specific sub-units, and which it is neither necessary, nor possible, to define. Nevertheless, such an assessment is a significant obstacle when attempting to provide fine-grained analyses of linguistic phenomena pertaining to manner. The aim of this paperi s to propose a more comprehensive definition of the concept of manner by bringing to the fore some basic mechanisms underlying the occurrence of the manner component in utterances, be ita t the syntactic, lexical, grammatical or morphological level.