With the current culture of quiet quitting in English, lying flat, or letting it rot in Chinese, I was curious if there is such a phrase in my own Mong language. The adverbs laam and dlogdlig will tell how the verb's action is done in a non-committed way, not wholeheartedly, etc. They can be used independently of each other (laam uo, laam pub, laam saib, uo dlogdlig, pub dlogdlig, saib dlogdlig) and could also be used together to describe the same word at the same time (laam uo dlogdlig, laam pub dlogdlig, laam saib dlogdlig). The intention is to intensify the idea of this less than the adequate effort of whatever the verb is, however, I am curious if there is a different name other than intensification, for this situation when the word is being modified prepositively and postpositively all at once.
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1If the pre- and postmodifiers form a single unit together, they would essentially be a circumfix; that doesn’t seem to be the case with your Mong example. There’s nothing particularly special about a word being modified by entities on either side of it in general, though, lots of languages can do that; e.g., Romance possessive determiners precede the head while most adjectives follow it (mi casa amarilla ‘my house yellow’); Greek articles precede, possessives follow (το σπίτι μου ‘the house mine’), etc.– Janus Bahs JacquetOct 5, 2022 at 21:35
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My understanding of circumfix is that both the prefix and suffix are fixed to the base word, however, in this situation, the adverb which is its own separate word just either comes before or after the verb it modifies. I know that most time we intensify a word by reduplicating that word, saying it twice, and what I am curious about is is there a word like reduplication that would be used for this prepositive and postpositive usage all at once to intensify the base word quality.– Mòòb LajleebOct 6, 2022 at 4:33
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Not that I know of, no.– Janus Bahs JacquetOct 6, 2022 at 7:55
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I do not understand your first sentence at all. English sometimes uses two adverbs together. Is that what you mean? "The speaker was really boringly dull." We don't prepose and postpose them around the same word.– LambieOct 6, 2022 at 20:38
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1 Answer
I don't speak Mong but it seems to me that both adverbs are just reinforcing each other semantically, and the fact that they go one before, another after the verb is just coincidental. As such, you won't see any specific syntactical name for this.
