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The term 'flat adverb' was coined in 1871 by John Earle, and even in that time they were viewed as "rustic and poetic" because they were "archaic". Flat adverbs were relatively common in English through the 18th century, although more so in the United States. Earle writes that the flat adverb was "all but universal with the illiterate". [16]
Many English adverbs are formed from adjectives by adding the ending -ly, as in hopefully, widely, theoretically (for details of spelling and etymology, see -ly). Certain words can be used as both adjectives and adverbs, such as fast, straight, and hard; these are flat adverbs. In earlier usage more flat adverbs were accepted in formal usage ...
William Bullokar wrote the earliest grammar of English, published in 1586.It includes a chapter on adverbs. His definition follows: An adverb is a part of speech joined with a verb or participle to declare their signification more expressly by such adverb: as, come hither if they wilt go forth, sometimes with an adjective: as, thus broad: & sometimes joined with another adverb: as, how soon ...
An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a determiner, a clause, a preposition, or a sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, or level of certainty by answering questions such as how , in what way , when , where , to what extent .
[10] [11] [12] If, however, one allows a small clause to contain a verb, then the sentences in (8d-e) can also be treated as containing small clauses: [13] The similarity across the sentences (8a-b-c) and (8d-e) is obvious, since the same subject-predicate relationship is present in all these sentences. Hence if one treats sentences (8a-b-c) as ...
A sentence consisting of at least one dependent clause and at least two independent clauses may be called a complex-compound sentence or compound-complex sentence. Sentence 1 is an example of a simple sentence. Sentence 2 is compound because "so" is considered a coordinating conjunction in English, and sentence 3 is complex.
Because English interjections do not inflect, some dictionaries and grammars have classified certain interjections as adverbs, another lexical category that tends not to inflect. [ 8 ] : 106 The Oxford English Dictionary , for example, classifies the word pop in pop went the cork as an adverb rather than an interjection. [ 11 ]
The other hallmark of prototypical intensifiers is that they are adverbs which lack the primary characteristic of adverbs: the ability to modify verbs. Intensifiers modify exclusively adjectives and adverbs, but this rule is insufficient to classify intensifiers, since there exist other words commonly classified as adverbs that never modify ...