The delimitation of ‘adverbial’

Adverbs and adverbials

There is some vacillation in English grammars as to the use of the terms adverb and adverbial, presumably because many studies of adverbials, e.g. Jacobson (1964) and Ernst (2002), have focused on adverbials realised by adverbs. In this study ‘adverb’ refers to the word class and ‘adverbial’ to a syntactic clause element, following, for example, Quirk et al. (1985) and Biber et al. (1999).

Adverbs constitute a heterogeneous word class and can have a variety of functions at phrase level (Quirk et al. 1985: 445ff). Besides acting as head of an adverb phrase, an adverb can modify adjectives, other adverbs, prepositions, nominal elements and verbs. At clause level, an adverb (phrase) typically fills the syntactic function of adverbial. However, adverbials may also be realised by noun phrases, prepositional phrases and finite, non-finite and verbless clauses. While adverbial (or adjunct) is generally recognised as a clause element, there is no general agreement on its delimitation. The following sections discuss some of the problems of classification with a view to supporting the analysis used in the present study.

Adverbial versus predicative (complement)

A particular problem of classification concerns prepositional phrases or adverb phrases that complement lexical be. The problem is illustrated by examples 1–4 below.

1. (1) Anne is Scottish.

2. (2) Anne is a Scotswoman.

3. (3) Anne is from Scotland.

4. (4) Anne is in Scotland.

The postverbal elements in (1) and (2) ascribe a property to the subject referent and answer questions such as ‘What is Anne (like)?’.