Re: Which part of speech?

Damian Yerrick <tepples@...> wrote:
> "Ray Brown" <ray.brown@...> wrote:
>> On Monday, May 9, 2005, at 05:23 , Muke Tever wrote:
>> > According to AHD:
>> > http://www.bartleby.com/61/91/Y0019100.html
>> > ..."yesterday" has both nominal and adverbial senses.
>>
>> today
>> "_n._ this or the present day. - _adv._ on the present day: nowadays"
>>
>> yesterday
>> "_n._ the day last past: (often in _pl._) the recent past - _adv._ on the
>> day last past: formerly: in the recent past"
>
> It can get hairier with compounds:
> "I was reading the CONLANG list last night."
>
> So then how do you parse "last night" as an adverb?  Wouldn't
> it just be simpler (in the Occam's Razor sense) to assign a
> zero-derived case to every noun naming a day?
As far as I'm aware, the traditional parts of speech apply to
individual words, not phrases.  (Necessarily so, as the breakdown
originally depended on declension as well as syntactic properties.)

"Last night" is a noun phrase being used as an adverb.[1] The exact
same thing happens explicitly in Toki Pona:

Tenpo pini *la,* mi lukin e   kulupu CONLANG.
time  past ADV   I  watch OBJ group  conlang

And in Latin:

Gregem    legi        proxima       nocte
group.ACC read.1sg.PF nearest.*ABL* night.*ABL*

...where ablative cases are the most common method of forming adverbs
(e.g. "nocte" on its own means "at night").

	*Muke!
[1] The same thing is of course historically true of "today" itself.
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