Adverbs

The positioning of adverbs in the sentence is as flexible in Sereer as in English.

gimam apaax
 gimam tok			
 apaax gimam 					
 tok gimam
 ‘I sing loudly.’

 nangam weʄa legleg	
 legleg nangam weʄa
 nangam legleg weʄa
 ‘I swim often.’

When adverbs modify adjectives, they cannot intervene between the stative verb and bare adjective with those adjectives that have a verb-adjective form, like balig 'black':

 oboxole fop abalga balig
 oboxole abalga balig fop
 *oboxole abalga fop balig
 'The dog is completely black.'

Adverbs have flexible noun-class membership, and sometimes can behave as tense-bearing verbs and as adjectives. For instance, fop can be the adverb 'completely', or the quantifier 'all' in a partitive construction:

 fop no boxole abalga balig
 ‘All of the dogs are black.’

The ability of adverbs to be used as verbs can be illustrated with these minimal pairs:

 retam ñofu	               ñofam o ret
 ‘I go quickly.’	       ‘I hurry up and go.’

 weji ñofu	               ñofi wej
 ‘Swim quickly!’              ‘Hurry up and swim!'	

Go back to: Sereer Grammar

Oana 00:47, 8 December 2012 (UTC)