Re: Which part of speech?

Quoting Damian Yerrick <tepples@...>:

> "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.
> >
> > Precisely! I quote from 'Chambers English Dictionary':
> >
> > 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?
Perhaps relevantly, in German, bare NPs used as temporal adverbials are put in
the accusative case, eg _Ich lese CONLANG jeden dritten Tag_. It would
certainly seem perverse to me to insist that _jeden dritten Tag_ is some sort
of derived adverb rather than a NP put in a case here functioning as temporal
locative.

                                                        Andreas