Adverbs in the history of English: ly-adverbs and others

Adverbs in the history of English have grown to be among my central research fields in the course of time. As adverbs derive from various sources, this research field of mine includes various different types of publications.

Forms of adverbs

I have been working on the addition of –s to make adverbs, with a particular focus on always and have published the following papers so far. Many of them are downloadable from an online site. The period from Late Middle English to Early Modern English is crucial in the development of always, which in earlier English more often appeared as alway.

• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2014. “The Shift from Alway to Always in the History of English”, in Studies in Middle and Modern English: Historical Change, ed. Yoko Iyeiri & Jennifer Smith, pp. 29-47. Suita: Osaka Books.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2016. “On Alway(s) and Algate(s) in Middle English Again”. Memoirs of the Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University 55: 61-80. (Downloadable PDF)
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2020. “Selected Authors’ Writings in the Early Modern English Period and the Historical Development of Always“. Memoirs of the Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University 59: 295-307.

I have also been working on –ly adverbs. Middle English texts often show variation between the suffix forms –liche and –ly, of which the latter is newer. This issue is discussed in:

• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2012. “Textual Transmission and Language Change in the Fifteenth Century: John Trevisa’s Middle English Translation of Higden’s Polychronicon“. Memoirs of the Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University 51: 107-128. 2012. (Downloadable PDF)
• Taguchi, Mayumi & Yoko Iyeiri. 2019. “Introduction”, in Pepysian Meditations on the Passion of Christ: Edited from Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2125. Middle English Texts, 56. Heidelberg: Universitaetsverlag Winter. (See the Introduction)

As for the Modern period, I have studied the competition between so-called zero adverbs and ly-adverbs (e.g. exceeding good vs. exceedingly good) in some datasets. For example, I have presented the following papers:

• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2023. “Exceeding Welcome vs. Exceedingly Welcome: Adverbs with and without –ly in Benjamin Franklin’s English”. 12th Historical Sociolinguistics Network (HiSoN 2023), 1 June 2023, Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2024. “When Did Americanism Begin? Adverbs with –ly in 19th-century Missionary Documents in Honolulu”, 13th Historical Sociolinguistics Network (HiSoN2024), 7 June 2024, Zurich University.

The contents in the paper on Benjamin Franklin’s English presented at HiSoN2023 have been incorporated into my recent book entitled Benjamin Franklin’s English: Form to Function Analyses (Abingdon: Routledge, 2025).

In relation to ly-adverbs, I have also discussed the expanding use of –ingly adverbs and have published the following:

• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2020. “So-called –ingly adverbs in Late Middle and Early Modern English”, in Corpora and the Changing Society: Studies in the evolution of English, ed. Paula Rautionaho, Arja Nurmi, and Juhani Klemola, pp. 199-222. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

In this article, I examined the use of –ingly adverbs in some of the corpora I have compiled. This research was inspired by Broccias (2012).*

*Broccias, Cristiano. 2012. Oriented –ingly adjuncts in late Modern English. In English Historical Linguistics 2008, vol. 2: Words, Texts and Genres, Hans Sauer & Gaby Waxenberger (eds), 147–164. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Negative adverbs

Negation involves negative adverbs such as ne ‘not’ (in earlier English), not, never, etc. I have worked on the historical development on English negative constructions and published reasonably extensively. For details, see my project page on negation in the history of English.