Lecture # 3. The adverb: grammatical and semantic characteristics

SRS-class

Parts of Speech. Semantic and grammatical characteristics of the adjective.

The adverb is a notional part of speech which denotes a quality of an action, or of another quality. In other words it defines when, where, how, in what circumstances the action is performed and specifies the quality denoted by the adjective. Not all the linguists include the adverb in the set of notional parts of speech. Sweet introduced it in the class of particles; Jespersen shared this viewpoint, differentiating it from the noun, the verb, the adjective, and the pronoun. The question seems to be disputable, the reason is that there has not been defined the boundary of the adverb (I am off; The plane took off, put up with, get on well with). These examples are differently termed as postpositives (N. Amosova), postpositions (I. Anitchkov, B. Ilyish), adverbs, etc. H.E. Palmer called them ‘preposition – like adverbs’.

Combinability: with adjectives as an adverbial modifier of intensity or refers to the whole situation as modifier of manner. There are different groups of adverbs, the main are quality and circumstance ones.

An adverb modifies a verb: Rick smiled mysteriously; an adjective: It was a most disagreeable odor; an adverb: The music ended rather abruptly.

Building of adverbs: simple (here, why, how, etc.) and derived by means of ly, wise, ways, wards (quickly, likewise, crossways, afterwards). Other compound adverbs are prepositional, phrasal: at least, inside, upside down.

Not all the adverbs are marked by the - ly morpheme (fast, hard), and not all the - ly forms are adverbs but adjectives (daily, lively).

Some adverbs have their conjunctive ‘twins’ which differ with their syntactical positions: before / before dinner, around / round the table. They must have the same origin: they express temporal or spatial relationships.

The preposition – like adverbs blend with the verb modifying its meaning: to give – to give up, to put – to put forward. The function of these post positional elements is either to impart an additional meaning to the verb or to introduce a lexical modification to its fundamental semantics: bring back – to cause to return, bring around / over – persuade into a change of opinion, bring about – to cause to happen. These elements have been interpreted in different ways: Some scholars have treated them as a variety of adverbs (H. Palmer, Smirnitsky); others as preposition – like functional words (I. Anichkov, N. Amosova). Blokh classes these words into a set of particles, correlative with prepositions and conjunctions. Iliysh The cited variety of viewpoints testifies to the complexity of this problem. The preposition –like adverbs do not, in fact, characterize the quality of the action. The answer to it might be found due to cognitive analysis of the units.

Groups of adverbs.

Traditionally the adverbs are classified into qualitative, quantitative and circumstantial ones. The qualitative include the ones showing the degree or intensification of the characteristic, e.g., very, highly, pretty, etc. So, they express the quantitative quality. The second group embraces the adverbs denoting the quality, e.g. well, nicely, quickly, etc. The circumstantial ones cover the adverbs of place and time, e.g. outside, yesterday, etc. On the whole they can be grouped according to their lexical meanings: the ones of manner, degree, cause, reason, place, direction, frequency, etc.

1. Some classes of them used to be included in the class of adverbs. Later Sweet and Russian linguists found out that they had more different functions than proper adverbs. Modal words emphasize the subjective attitude of the speaker to the event denoted by a sentence. Meanings: modality of certainty / uncertainty (indeed, of course, sure/maybe, perhaps, probably), modality of wish / the lack of wish (luckily, fortunately/unlucky, unfortunately). They are not an obligatory part of a sentence: they can be omitted but the sentence becomes an objective unfolding of facts. E.g., Perhaps she is in the office. A modal word can refer to a word or phrase and to the whole sentence: Perhaps you would be good enough to explain this for me?; I know unfortunately, he is right.

Grammatical category.

The adverb has a grammatical category of comparison degree which includes two types of its formation: the derived (faster, fastest), the analytical (more, most quickly) and the lexical (better, worse) ones.

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