A Adverbs

      LEO FRANCIS HOYE

      Adverbs often get a bad press. No other part of speech incites such vitriol. In his skit on the vagaries of English grammar and the uses of adverbs in particular, Mark Twain writes: “I am dead to adverbs; they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference” (Twain, 1880, p. 850). Twain is not alone in excoriating this hapless part of speech. Stephen King wades in with

      I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs . . . they're like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day . . . fifty the day after that . . . and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. (King, 2000, p. 95)

The novelist/screenwriter Elmore Leonard caps this with his injunction: “If an adverb became a character in one of my books, I'd have it shot. Immediately” (D'Agostino, 2009, p. 86). Henry James is among the few to protest their worth: “I'm glad you like adverbs—I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect” (James, 1920, pp. 214–15). Although largely optional, if used purposefully, adverbs can add meaning to other clause elements, such as adjectives, other adverbs, nouns, verbs, even entire clauses. Ending an interview with the wife of a suspect, a detective enjoins: “‘Perhaps you would notify us, if he returns?’ ‘Oh definitely, surely, absolutely, no doubt about it’” (Furst, 2010, p. 23). Cull the adverbs (italicized) and the exchange comes to an ungainly halt: “‘You would notify us, if he returns?’ ‘Oh yes.’” The oblique command and the unease this engenders are gone. Syntactically mobile and semantically diverse, adverbs cover a range of meanings and grammatical functions; they are unique (adjectives excepted) in the number and variety that may co‐occur in a sentence, as the Furst extract demonstrates.

      Adverbs can be used at best to marked effect; at worst, to create a verbal swamp. Their sheer diversity of use and function has earned them a maverick status as “the most nebulous and puzzling of the traditional word classes” (Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, & Svartvik, 1985, p. 438). Adverbs are heterogeneous: Their miscellany of assorted features has fueled the argument that, where a word cannot be assigned to another word class (such as noun, verb, adjective), it must be an adverb by default, rendering this a “catch‐all” or “residual” category (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002, p. 563). Such heterogeneity makes for considerable semantic and syntactic diversity—something of a linguistic smorgasbord or a “rag‐bag category” (Hasselgård, 2010, p. 3)! None of these assessments should bolster a negative view of their significance: “Adverbials are fascinating because of their enormous semantic and syntactic flexibility, as well as their elusiveness. In many ways a functional study of adverbials thus becomes a study of text and language in general” (Hasselgård, 2010, p. vii). In profiling their main features, this entry seeks to highlight the role and significance of adverbs for our everyday spoken or written communication. The examples that follow are given in italics, where the specific adverb(ial) in focus is also underlined: They listened attentively. Frequent reference is made to three state‐of‐the‐art grammars of contemporary English: Quirk et al. (1985); Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, and Finegan (1999); and Huddleston and Pullum (2002), and Hasselgård's (2010) major, up‐to‐date study on adverbials. The language examples used are mostly based on and derive from language corpora, particularly from the British National Corpus (hosted by Brigham Young University) (Davies, 2004) and the Brigham Young University 14 billion‐word iWeb Corpus (Davies, 2018) in order to provide examples that are as authentic as possible, even where these are edited to accord with the encyclopedic purpose of the entry.

Form and Function

Formwise, adverbs are morphologically more complex than the other word classes. Of the three constituent categories, two are closed class: simple adverbs (back; down; just; only; through; under; well; up) and compound adverbs (herein [here + in], therefore [there + fore], nowhere [no + where], somehow [some + how], whenever [when + ever]. Closed class adverbs are fixed or finite in number and rarely admit new members. Many refer to time, position, or direction and are also known as “function words” or “grammar words”: they tend to be abstract in meaning and signal the structural relationships between words and even sentences.

      The third category, derivational adverbs, is open class: New adverbs can always be added. Many end in that most productive adverbial suffix ‐ly, which can be glossed ‘in an adjective manner/way’ (It is essential that all these issues be addressed openly > in an open manner; Each side listened attentively to the other > in an attentive way) or ‘to an adjective degree/extent’ (I have enjoyed my time enormously > to an enormous extent; the tabloids actually have the power to influence significantly > to a significant degree). However, there is no regular or necessary correspondence of meaning between adjectives (adj.) and their ‐ly adverb derivatives: There was a major and unexpected change in current (adj.) trends versus This is currently one of the most popular and safest ways of setting up on your own; The trainer has used a touch of pure (adj.) genius to prepare his players for the match versus It's purely a matter for the Central Committee; They were greeted with an almost eyewatering (adj.) aroma of disinfectant and cigarette smoke versus It's expensive, but not as eye‐wateringly costly as owning your own jet. (See further in Huddleston & Pullum, 2002, p. 566; Crystal, 2004, p. 269.)

      Adverbs ending in ‐ly sometimes co‐occur in complementary opposition: You can have one life publicly and another life privately; Too carefully led or too carelessly ignored?; The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily; They sometimes but not always pay attention. Just occasionally ‐ly attaches to a noun, as in this recipe title for beef tripe: Offaly‐Delicious!; or to a phrase: Relaxed and humorous, he spoke matter‐of‐factly about his addiction: the theatre. Adjectives and adverbs (in that order) may act in concert to give emphasis, as in advertising copy: X wants to live his private (adj.) life privately; It's about absolute (adj.) performance absolutely. The ‐ly domain is a veritable stomping ground for verbal dexterity.

      As regards usage, adverbial neologisms sometimes attract criticism for stylistic reasons, as in the blending of the adjectives huge and tremendous: The