Adverbial elements

Adverbial elements can refer to (i) space; (ii) time; (iii) frequency or degree; or (iv) manner of an activity or state. They can comprise a word (e.g. there, inside; today, already; often, always; slowly, craftily), a phrase (in the garden, (during) last night, at infrequent intervals, with sincerity) or a clause (where we had built the house, before she arrived, whenever he felt like it, as his mother had always told him). Adverbial phrases are generally introduced by a preposition, although there are exceptions, e.g. last week, many times, this way. Adverbial clauses generally have the structure of a main clause with a preposed subordinator, e.g. where, after. There is an additional type of adverbial clause of time whose VP begins with the -ing form of a verb, e.g. His mother having gone out for the day, John invited his friends in to play poker. The subject of an -ing time clause will be omitted if it is the same as the main clause subject, e.g. (After) having failed his final exam, John threw a tantrum.

There are basically five syntactic functions for an adverb (which is underlined):

(a) Modifying a complete clause or sentence (sentence function), as in She had deliberately broken the vase.

(b) Modifying a verb, plus object if it has one (manner function), as in She had [gathered up the pieces carefully].

(c) Modifying a complete noun phrase, as in She had gathered up [almost all the pieces].

(d) Modifying an adjective, as in She had gathered up [the really big pieces].

(e) Modifying another adverb, as in She had [gathered up the pieces [terribly carefully]].

Each of the functions has a set of possible positions, chosen from final, initial, after the first word of the auxiliary, immediately before the verb etc. These are discussed in detail later. Note that an adverb may not intervene between a verb and its direct object.

Spatial adverbials behave in two rather different ways, depending on the semantic type of the predicate head. With verbs from the REST and MOTION types and from the LOOK subtype of ATTENTIN we get a spatial adverbial (an ‘inner adverbial’) that is semantically linked to the reference of the verb—He sat on a chair, She carried the pig to market, She stared at the picture. Indeed, some of these verbs demand a spatial adverbial, e.g. He put the box down/there/on the table (*He put the box is incomplete and thus unacceptable). Such ‘inner adverbials’ generally occur after the predicate; they can exceptionally occur initially, and may then take a marked intonation pattern, e.g. On top of the hill (,) he put his boundary marker. Spatial adverbs occurring with verbs of other semantic types do not have the same sort of semantic link to the verb (they can be called ‘outer adverbials’) and are often moved to initial position, e.g. In the garden Mary kissed John is as acceptable as John kissed Mary in the garden.

A time or spatial adverbial element—which may be a word, a phrase or a clause—can also occur as part of an NP, as in [The noises in the night] upset Father; although the noises occurred in the night, Father might not have been upset until he was told about them at breakfast, on his return from the night shift. Compare with The noises upset Father in the night, which has in the night as a clause constituent, and implies that Father was actually upset in the night by the noises. A sentence like We are expecting my uncle from the city is ambiguous between the NP-modifier parsing (my uncle lives in the city, but he might be arriving today from some other direction) and the clause-adverbial reading (he is coming from the city today, although he might live somewhere entirely different). It will be disambiguated when further material is added, e.g. We are expecting [my uncle from the city] to come here today, and We are expecting my uncle [to come here from the city] today.