Adverb

Adverb (plural: the adverbs), also circumstantial word or (nowadays more rarely used) secondary word, designates in grammar a type of word. This classification states first of all that the adverb is to be distinguished from the grammatical function (sentence function) of an adverbial (just as, for example, the word type noun is to be distinguished from a function as subject or object of a sentence). Words called adverbs typically serve as adverbials, but sometimes occur in other functions (as attributes or predicatives).

Many grammars (especially grammars of usage and school grammars) are predominantly concerned with its various types of meaning in their presentation of the adverb. For example, a distinction is then made between:

• Adverbs of the place
• Adverbs of time
• Adverbs of the manner ...

and many other classes. - Before that, however, it must be clarified which words are adverbs and which are not, because the same meanings could also be expressed by words of other kinds. For example, in the case of locative words such as "left", "opposite", "behind", it is quite debatable in the literature whether these words should be adverbs or prepositions (or in which constructions they are respectively). In the present article, therefore, the focus will be on the questions concerning the grammatical determination of adverbs, i.e. their distinction from other parts of speech such as adjective, preposition, etc. For the classes of content, reference is made to the overview in the article Adverbial Bestimmung and the corresponding special articles.

The characteristic grammatical property of adverbs is:

• They occur as single words, which themselves already form sentence elements.
• They are immutable (i.e. not inflectable).

In contrast to the second point, adverbial constructions with words like fast ("drive fast") or late ("return late") show words that are in principle inflectional: "go fast, return late". Therefore, in linguistics such adverbials are not classified as adverbs according to their part of speech, but as adjectives in adverbial function (this grammatical classification as adjectives is not influenced by the fact that the word "late" has the meaning of a time indication).

Thus, typical and unambiguous examples of adverbs remain words like often (as a temporal or frequency adverbial), gladly (as a modal adverbial) or fortunately (sentence adverbial) as in: We often eat in the restaurant I like to give a tip. Fortunately, there was still a table free.

The words "often" and "gladly" are considered uncontroversial adverbs because they cannot be further decomposed, cannot be inflected, and have no uses other than adverbial. The type glücklich-er-weise also appears to be an uncontroversial adverb because it has an ending that is clearly assigned to the domain of word formation (i.e., the derivation of new words from an adjective). In German, such endings always denote special adverbial types of meaning (in the case of "fortunately" it is an evaluative, commenting sentence adverbial).

In many languages (but not German) there are further adjective-derived forms with very regular use which do not mark a special meaning but adverbial status as such, for example in English with the ending -ly as in happy / happi-ly ("happy" or "fortunately") or Italian dolce / dolcemente ("sweet"). While such forms are often regarded as the ideal type of adverb, there is, on the other hand, much debate in linguistics as to whether they belong to a separate part of speech at all, or whether they are not rather inflectional forms of adjectives. These supposedly most typical cases are thus precisely those for which the affiliation to adverbs in the strict sense of a separate part of speech is most uncertain - although the use of the designation "adverb" is nevertheless unanimously common in practice.

Overall, then, the adverb is a particularly problematic case among the parts of speech. The affiliation of certain words to the category of adverb is often disputed, and adverbs often seem like an inconsistent residual class. Many common explanations of the term draw on typical examples and rely on typical functions and meanings of these words. This often blurs the distinction between a word type adverb and a function adverbial, even if this distinction is at the same time theoretically presupposed.

Development of the term "adverb

The designation "adverb" goes back to Latin adverbium "what stands by the verb", this in turn originated as a translation of the Greek expression epirrhema (ancient Greek επίρρημα) in the grammar of Dionysius Thrax. This original designation accordingly means an "epithet to the propositional phrase (the ῥῆμα rhema)". However, already in the grammar of Dionysius Thrax, examples are also given for this category which go beyond an adjunct to the verb. Adverbs, then, contrary to what the name suggests, cannot refer only to verbs (for more on this, see below).

In traditional grammar, attempts are often made to determine the type of word adverb by specifying content-related functions, for example, that they are words which specify "place, time, modality (here ≈ manner), reason". These functions are the same as those found for prepositions and for subordinating clauses or subordinating conjunctions, and are altogether characteristic of adverbials. With this overlap in content, the remaining characteristic of adverbs is that they are words which, unlike prepositions and subordinating conjunctions, do not require grammatical complements. The result is a definition of the adverb as an "adverbial single word".

In more recent presentations of German grammar, a syntactic determination is preferred: adverbs could be characterized as (1) an inflectionless word type, whose representatives (2) can form a clause by themselves. The criterion for the status of a clause is the ability to appear in front, i.e. before the finite verb in the proposition:

_{Today / there / hurriedly / because of this }_ came Hans.

According to this criterion, adverbs are thus distinguished (1) from inflectable parts of speech such as adjectives and (2) from uninflected words which do not have the status of a clause, i.e. particles in the narrower sense which are not prefixable. The demarcation issue to different word types will be presented in detail in the next section.

Non-adverbial uses of adverbs

In contrast to a traditional definition of the adverb as an "adverbial single word" and in contrast to the literal sense of the term "adverb", uninflected words that appear as a closer clause to a noun are also called adverbs. It is mainly adverbs of place and time that appear in this usage. They still differ from adjectives in that they appear uninflected after the noun:

[That car there] is mine. [Yesterday's meeting] was poorly attended.

A position before the noun is then only possible for adjectival derivations:

Yesterday's meeting

Such attributive uses of adverbs are also found in English, also with the adverb-typical ending -ly:

[His transformation into a werewolf so rapidly] was unnerving. shortages both nationally and internationally of these metals

Furthermore, it can be observed that many words which are otherwise used adverbially, but which are impossible as adjective attributes, can also occur in a predicative function; this, too, is not considered to be an obstacle to the use of the word type adverb here:

He made efforts in vain. NOT: * the efforts in vain Those efforts were in vain. He runs the business alone. NOT: * the sole proprietor (only: sole proprietor) He is / remains alone.