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The Mobility of Adverbials

The document discusses different types of adjunct adverbials and how they modify clauses by providing additional information about time, place, manner, condition, purpose, reason, result, and concession. It also discusses verb phrases and their structure, phrasal verbs, ellipsis, and sentence adverbials.

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Adesti Anggita Putri
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62 views3 pages

The Mobility of Adverbials

The document discusses different types of adjunct adverbials and how they modify clauses by providing additional information about time, place, manner, condition, purpose, reason, result, and concession. It also discusses verb phrases and their structure, phrasal verbs, ellipsis, and sentence adverbials.

Uploaded by

Adesti Anggita Putri
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Adjunct adverbials (VP Adverbials)

Adjunct adverbials are words, phrases, and clauses that modify an entire clause by providing
additional information about time, place, manner, condition, purpose, reason, result, and
concession. Adjunct adverbial is a grammatical function. The grammatical forms that can
function as the adjunct adverbial in English grammar are the adverb phrase, prepositional phrase,
adverb clause, noun phrase, and verb phrase. Adjunct adverbials are not constituents of either the
subject or the predicate. adjuncts express a wide range of ideas, including manner, means,
purpose, reason, place, and time (including duration and frequency). They tend to answer
questions like Where? Why? When? How? What for? How long? How often? How many times?
Since adjunct is one type of adverbial function, you won’t be surprised to learn that, in addition
to PPs, adverb phrases (AdvP) can also function adjunct adverbials.

Level Of Verb Phrase

A verb phrase consists of a main verb alone, or a main verb plus any modal and/or auxiliary
verbs. The main verb always comes last in the verb phrase. For example:

The author is writing a new book.

I must make an "A" in this class.

The dog might eat the cake.

Proper sentence structure requires both a subject and a verb. But unless that verb is in the past or
present tense, sentences use verb phrases. Using the correct verb phrase structure depends on the
verb tense, the subject and the mood of the sentence. When forming verb phrases, it’s helpful to
know which verbs go in each position.

The mobility of adverbials

Indeed, the very fact that you can move a PP around in a sentence is a sure sign that it’s
functioning as an adverbial and not as a complement of the V. in She hardly slept last night, there
is a preceding adjunct (the AdvP hardly) and a following adjunct (the NP last night). In
representing this sentence you’re going to have to decide, intuitively, whether hardly pre-
modifies a VP of the form slept last night or whether last night post-modifies a VP of the form
hardly slept. In other words, which of the two adjunct adverbials is higher in the structure? Try
and decide this and then draw a phrase marker.

Phrasal Verb

Phrasal verbs are very common in English, especially in more informal contexts. They are made
up of a verb and a particle or, sometimes, two particles. The particle often changes the meaning
of the verb.

I called Jen to see how she was. (call = to telephone)

They've called off the meeting. (call off = to cancel)

In terms of word order, there are two main types of phrasal verb: separable and inseparable.

Ellipsis

Ellipsis happens when we leave out (in other words, when we don’t use) items which we would
normally expect to use in a sentence if we followed the grammatical rules. The following
examples show ellipsis. When we can easily understand everything in the sentence because of
the surrounding text, we use textual ellipsis. For example, we know that certain verbs and
adjectives can be followed by a that-clause, so if we see a clause without that after such verbs
and adjectives, we assume that the writer or speaker wants us to understand the same meaning as
a that-clause:

I knew [that] something terrible had happened.

Maureen was glad [that] we had called in to see her.

Are you afraid [that] you won’t get a job when you leave college?

Sentence Adverbials (A adverbials)

Whereas an adverb typically modifies the verb of a sentence, a sentence adverb is an adverb that
appears usually at the beginning of a sentence and modifies the sentence as a whole. This type of
adverb usually ends in –ly and is often followed by a comma. All the adverbials looked at so far
are adjunct adverbials. They are modifiers of a VP within a higher VP. Adjunct adverbials, then,
could just as well be called ‘VP-adverbials’. In this section I contrast them with two other kinds
of adverbial – disjunct and conjunct adverbials – which I shall group together as sentence
adverbials (S-adverbials). As mentioned, instead of modifying some element within the sentence,
the S-adverbial relates to the sentence as a whole, considered as a unit. So, as suggested by the
terms ‘VP-adverbial’ and ‘S-adverbial’ of VP within a higher VP vs. functioning as a modifier of
S within a higher S.

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