30
votes
Accepted
What is the idea behind calling the adverb the garbage can of words?
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 ...
- 1,490
11
votes
Accepted
Are there languages that inflect adverbs for gender
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 ...
- 17.4k
8
votes
Accepted
What kind of phrase is "until recently"?
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 ...
- 1,490
6
votes
Did the Greek adverb for "late" evolve into a preposition meaning "after"?
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" > "(...
- 3,266
6
votes
Accepted
Is the adverbial phrase and adverb phrase identical?
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 ...
- 3,817
6
votes
Is the adverbial phrase and adverb phrase identical?
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 (...
- 831
5
votes
Accepted
Is there a term for words that modify the intensity of something
They are called intensifiers. This term is pretty widespread, and I couldn't think of another.
- 2,502
5
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-wise, -mente, -ment: How many languages use the "mind" metaphor for adjectives made adverbs?
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 ...
- 62.1k
5
votes
Accepted
Why are these adjectives being presented as adverbs in syntax tree (Carnie, 3rd Edition)?
The distinction between "adjective" and "adverb" is not always clear in English, where many words can be used interchangeably as either. But the usual definition is that adjectives ...
- 62.1k
4
votes
Difference between particle and adverb in English
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 ...
- 12.4k
4
votes
Is the word "here" a preposition?
"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 ...
- 62.1k
4
votes
'Before'/'after' as a spatial metaphor: is the opposite possible?
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 ...
- 17.6k
4
votes
Accepted
Do other languages than English have verbals ,too?
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),...
- 29.5k
4
votes
Are there languages that inflect adverbs for gender
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 ...
- 80.2k
4
votes
Accepted
What are the pros and cons of having adjectives appear first?
Which approach allows for the transfer of a higher amount of information bits per second?
This is, as it turns out, a question that can be answered experimentally: neither. Coupé, Oh, Dediu, and ...
- 62.1k
4
votes
What is the benefit of tenses when time period can be pinned down by adverbs?
The benefit of tenses compared to compositional phrases is analogous to the benefit of having words like "horse; run; green". We could do without such words, instead using a descriptive ...
- 80.2k
3
votes
Accepted
Are there languages in which adverbs inflect?
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 ...
- 17.4k
3
votes
What is the part of speech of 'modifiers to adjectives'?
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 ...
- 29.5k
3
votes
Difference between particle and adverb in English
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 ...
- 12.4k
3
votes
About phrasal verbs, separable verb and verbs with adverbs
Well, separable verbs and phrasal verbs are different things because they work differently.
Ich muss die Tür auf-machen.
*I need to up-bring it.
The particle part of an English phrasal verb never ...
- 62.1k
2
votes
Difference between particle and adverb in English
There’s no difference, as you put it, since particles are mainly prepositions. "Particle" is not a distinct word category (part of speech) as such, but a term used for certain words that have the ...
- 831
2
votes
Accepted
Which word is the head of the phrase "somewhere there"?
Somewhere there is a crime happening.
In the sentence above from the Robocop films the word somewhere is functioning as a Locative Adjunct. Notice that it can appear either at the beginning or end of ...
- 3,817
2
votes
What is the syntax of "second" in phrases like "the second most common problem"?
The primary question was for a reference to scholarly treatment of the problem. Until somebody can deliver this, I might as well try to provoke it with a moon shot. You ask for an analysis based on ...
- 1,434
2
votes
Formal semantics (Montague, type-theoretical) of adverbial clauses
I don't see the problem. If you know how to handle restrictive relative clauses, then you must know how to handle adverbial clauses. The example "you can sit where you like" means "you can sit in ...
- 12.4k
2
votes
'Ago' and 'on' vs. 'in'
I tend to favor a modified ellipsis analysis, with a few added in observations.
The "prepositional phrase" analysis for phrases like "a month in" tends to hold up well, because you can replace whole ...
- 2,354
2
votes
Accepted
Why can interrogatives so often be used-as/made-into intensifier adverbs?
I'm not sure how universal the use of interrogative words as intensifiers is, but one possibility comes to mind:
People will often spontaneously exclaim "What!?" or "How?!" when something unexpected ...
- 256
2
votes
What is the benefit of tenses when time period can be pinned down by adverbs?
In English, time period can be conveyed by saying "Tom punched Marty." To do this with adverbs, you'd say "Tom had, in the past, punched Marty." That's wordy and still uses the ...
2
votes
What is the benefit of tenses when time period can be pinned down by adverbs?
There are no benefits, net. Both are roughly equally dense and expressive.
This is rather like the benefits of pronouns vs. verb inflections, or prepositions and postpositions vs. noun inflections.
...
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vote
What is the syntax of "second" in phrases like "the second most common problem"?
I don't understand the constituent tree you quoted. Here is my attempt, also using a parenthesis notation with indentation showing substructure:
(S (NP This)
(VP is
(NP the
(ADJ ...
- 12.4k
1
vote
The tree diagram of he refuted the allegation that he is gay
Here is a simplified tree diagram of your sentence:
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