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Traditional grammarians going all the way back to Donatus are accused of classifying as adverb any word they couldn't make fit anywhere else in the canonical parts of speech.
It's a very old criticism. The Stoic grammarians are suspected of having their tongues skewed into their cheeks when they employed the word pandektes ('all-receiver') for adverb. John ...
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Although adverb agreement in gender/noun class is far from ubiquitous, there seem to be (apparent) examples of this kind of agreement in a fair number of languages. I am most familiar with examples of gender-agreeing adverbs from Indo-European, since that is a large and well-studied family containing many languages with gender systems. But there do seem to ...
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Your 'rules' mix traditional and contemporary grammars. It's true in both traditional and contemporary grammars that a preposition phrase [PP] consists of a preposition and an object; but in contemporary grammars PPs 'establish relations' between constituents, not as in traditional grammar 'words'. Your third rule acknowledges this in defining the object of ...
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I'm not sure about conjuation in specific, but inflection of adverbs is definitely possible. There are numerous examples in various languages:
English: can man travel faster than light
German: kann man schneller als das Licht reisen
Serbo-Croatian: da li može čov(j)ek putovati brže od sv(j)etla
In all three of these languages, the bolded word is an ...
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If we step off linguistic terminology to some philosophy, everything becomes more straightforward.
Adjectives define properties of "things";
Adverbs define properties of "relations".
TL;DR
Human logic operates with two fundamental categories, "things" and "relations".
Things are linguistically represented with nouns, pronouns, and noun-like entities like ...
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I very much dislike the term "adverbial".
I think it is very unsatisfactory to have a function term that is morphologically derived from a category term. Adverb is a word category, and adverb phrase (a phrase headed by an adverb) the corresponding phrase category.
Adverbial is a function and may be realised by an AdvP (He spoke quickly), a PP (He spoke ...
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Short answer
An adverb phrase is best thought of as a phrase headed by an adverb, in the same way that a preposition phrase is a phrase headed by a preposition and so forth. An 'Adverbial' is a Modifier within a clause or sentence. In other words Adverbial is a grammatical relation like Subject or Object, whereas adverb phrase is a phrasal category like ...
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They are called intensifiers. This term is pretty widespread, and I couldn't think of another.
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Quite a few, and they mostly inherited it from Proto-Romance.
In Classical Latin (the Latin written by Vergil and Cicero), there were a few different ways of forming adverbs, using the suffixes -e and -iter. For example, "sad" was tristis, and "sadly" was triste.
In Vulgar Latin (the Latin spoken on the streets of Rome), however, these ...
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The examples you chose are not particularly fortunate but the problem you're alluding to is one commonly encountered when it comes to aspect or tense. For instance, present tense is often used to refer to future events "We're leaving at 5 tomorrow." And even here you could argue that the aspect is misaligned too. And there are many instances in Slavic ...
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It's an adverb, since it is used between the parts of the compound verbal predicate; since there is the adjective 'probable', and an adjective + the '-ly' suffix produces an adverb; and since it modifies the whole sentence and that is one of the functions of adverbs.
The synonyms are:
in all likelihood, in all probability, as likely as not, very likely, ...
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Things are called particles when they undergo the rule Particle Shift. "Particle" is an ad hoc POS made up to fill the need for a notation to use to describe when the rule works. It is not a happy event when a syntactician has to invent a new special category just to make his rules work, but what can one do? Anyone with a better idea should bring it forth ...
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"Here" is not a preposition per se.
By definition, prepositions come before a noun phrase (or determiner phrase) to create prepositional phrases:
He was (in (the house)).
They saw him (with (a knife)).
"Here" cannot do this.
*He was here the house.
*They saw him here a knife.
However...
"Here" does act quite a bit like a ...
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At least, other Indogermanic languages have the ability to derive nouns from verbs, too. In Latin, there is a suffix -tio, -tionis that forms abstract nouns (like derivatio "derivation" from derivare), there is a suffix -or (applied to the supine stem) that derives agents (like actor "actor" from agere, ago, egi, actum).
The process of derivation is part of ...
answered Mar 13 '17 at 14:28
jk - Reinstate Monica
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In Bantu languages, adverbs are often inflected for noun cl. 8, for example Shona ndakáryá zvi-díkí "I ate a bit" with the cl 8 form of "small" (-díkí), Swahili unaongea kiswahili vi-zuri "you speak Swahili well", cl. 8 form of "good" (-zuri). I do not know of any evidence that agreement propagates from adverbs ("very" is non-agreeing).
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We imagine the time flowing at us from our front to our back, so the future is in front of us and the past is behind us, for us the time flows from the future into the past. I don't know about all the languages, but for those who speak Aymara, a South American language, it is all vice versa, for them the time flows from behind, from the past and into the ...
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The following illustrates my second answer to this question, which is that "particles" have no part of speech.
Earlier descriptions of subcategorization
In that first generation of great young desriptivists from MIT, Robert Lees gave arbitrary and artificial category symbols to express restrictions that tree neighbors place on heads. I'm not sure I've got ...
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The answer to this question has (again) to do with the argument vs. adjunct distinction. Often the term complement is used in place of argument, although the argument notion is more clearly defined. Arguments are usually noun phrases (NPs), whereas adjuncts are typically adverbs, prepositional phrases (PPs), or clauses. Sometimes, however, PPs and clauses ...
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ὀψέ has survived in Modern Cypriot Greek, as the adverb ψες "last night". (The deletion of initial unstressed o- is semi-regular; the addition of final -s to adverbs is also semi-regular.)
"late" > "(last) night" is a common semantic transition; cf Spanish tardes, and for that matter Ancient βραδύ "late" > Modern βράδυ "evening".
In Modern Cypriot, as in ...
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Could certain adjectives or adverbs be analysed to function as a type of copula in Mandarin Chinese?
Leaving the broader question about copulas to one side here. Po and Rimmington’s ‘Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar’ (Routledge) has a good explanation for why ‘我好’ is not a well-formed answer to ‘你好嗎?’ (which I’m guessing is the context.) Having the predicative adjective unmarked implies a contrast, ‘I’m good (but not him!)’. A degree adverb like 很 is ...
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In standard average European languages and also in classical Latin and Greek, there is no new part of speech for a modifier of an adjective or adverb, it is just an adverb.
I don't know whether there are languages having "adadjectives" that are different from adverbs.
answered Oct 20 '17 at 18:05
jk - Reinstate Monica
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Yes, there are supposed to be some languages that have adverbs that show inflectional agreement with the head verb. I don't know enough to give an overview, but one example seems to be Maori, where adverbs modifying a passive verb take passive marking, and those midifying a nominalized verb take nominalizing marking ("Formal Property Inheritance and ...
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-ედ (or perhaps we should just say -დ) is the normal adverbial ending for noun or adjective stems ending in ე. So you have the following forms:
consonant stems
წიგნ-ი > წიგნ-ად
vowel stems
დედა > დედა-დ
მეპურე > მეპურე-დ
გოგო > გოგო-დ
ყრუ > ყრუ-დ
here should also be included the rare i stem nouns such as the example Tschenkeli gives: ტრამვაი > ...
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It was actually used in both ways by Philostratos (e.g. Vita Apollonii: τὰς δὲ εὐεργεσίας ὀψὲ διδόναι). But I think we may call it a personal way of expression or a local variant, rather than an established preposition, because this usage didn't survive. The word ὀψέ had been mainly used as an adverb for more than a millennium after Philostratos; so we ...
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Their definition is very general: adverbs are distinguished from adjectives, which modify nouns, by saying that ‘adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs’
You have (mostly) answered yourself by giving that definition. Adjectives describe nouns, and the adverbs describe other parts of speech. In English, the same word function often as many part of ...
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I would render the X' node as NP; the noun feet is head of the phrase 5 feet. So yes, the NP 5 feet appears as a predependent of the adjective tall, i.e. it appears on a left branch underneath the adjective.
Otherwise, I think the analysis in the question is basically correct (as far as phrase structure analyses go). NPs can indeed function as adjuncts, e....
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The existence of adjectival or adverbial complements of prepositions is very improbable on purely conceptual grounds, because a) all true prepositions are two-place predicates, b) by definition, a predicate must take one or more arguments as its complements (broad sense, 'subjects' included), c) arguments must be encoded by referential expressions (names ...
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Categories are defined on the basis of distributional equivalence, so there are two possibilities here.
Your professor thinks that intensifier is a better name for this particular category than adverb is, more or less in the same way that some people still use the somewhat dated substantive instead of the more common noun. This means that he's just taking ...
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Wow, the example is indeed probably offensive to some, and I apologize in advance to anyone who is offended by the fact that I am now going to risk an answer.
I agree with the question's premise that one hell of a is frozen expression that functions syntactically like an adjective. Thus one hell of a is an adjective modifying dick. Interestingly, the ...
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If adverbs are an independent part of speech that cannot be inflected,
it follows from the definitions you give (which I also checked in
Wikipedia), that any adverb is trivially its own lemma.
That may be often the case in English (not my mother tongue, in case
it was not noticed). But not always: for example, some short adverbs
can be inflected for ...
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