There are different kinds of adverbs, including adverbs of degree, adverbs of manner, time-when adverbs, duration adverbs, and frequency adverbs.
Degree adverbs are used with adjectival words. They can be absolute, as in "five feet high", or relative, as in "2 years older". A degree adverb uses a number or other quantity word as the verb part and a units word as the noun part.
|"The man is older than the woman by two years."|
Degree words such as "very" and "slightly" are handled the same way:
|"The dog is very heavy."|
|"The man is much older than the woman."|
Manner adverbs are different from depictives, although they use the same inflections. A manner adverb simply uses "manner" as its noun part.
|"John left angrily."|
Inherently adverbial words are treated the same way:
|"The cat runs fast."|
For time-when adverbs, the noun part is a time unit such as "day" (of the week or month) or "month". There are a couple of things that can be used for the verb part. First, ordinal numbers can be used:
|"John leaves on the 3rd."|
Another desirable thing to use is names. This is a problem because names are nouns, not verbs. What has to be done then is to use a suffix to derive a verb from the name (currently called N2V for noun-to-verb; I need a better term). This looks like month-name-N2V-Sec. Common nouns use the same form.
|"John leaves on Sunday."|
To use a time-when adverb attributively, it must be unpacked.
|"John leaves on the 3rd day of the 10th month."|
For duration adverbs, the noun part is a unit of duration and the verb part is a quantity word. Duration is the length of a time interval, with a start-point and an end-point. Where the start and end times occur depends on the tense (or compound tense). First, the absolute tenses:
|Fut||the start-point may be either the present moment or some future time|
|Prs||the absolute present isn't used|
|Prf||depends on the verb's class:|
|if the verb is dynamic, the end-point is the present moment|
|if the verb is static, the end-point may be either the present moment or some past time|
|Aor||the end-point is some past time|
|"We walked for two hours."|
|"We've been walking for two hours."|
Now, some (absolute) compound tenses:
|past||progressive.||- the end-point is an indefinite past time|
|future||progressive||- the start-point is an indefinite future time|
|past||perfect||- the end-point is a definite past time|
|future||perfect||- the end-point is a definite future time|
|past||prospective||- the start-point is a definite past time|
|future||prospective||- the start-point is a definite future time|
|"We will be walking for two hours."|
|"We had been walking for two hours."|
For frequency adverbs, the noun part is either "iteration", "occasion", or "frequency". The last is used for the words "often" and "rarely", using the quantity words "many" and "few", respectively. The others may take any meaningful quantity word as the verb part.
|"I went to Rome once."|
page started: 2013.Aug.05 Sat
current date: 2013.Aug.06 Tue
content and form originated by qiihoskeh
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