This squib examines the semantic, selectional and distributional prop-erties of two French duration adverbs, longtemps and longuement. Despite grammars traditionally treat them as synonyms, longtemps be-haves as an event adverb, while longuement is a verbal adverb. They are both found in the position reserved to adverbs of duration in the universal hierarchy of adverbs established by Cinque (1999). How-ever, longtemps can only precede longuement, as in the hierarchy event adverbs are always on the left of verbal adverbs.
