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LEO FRANCIS HOYE

Adverbs often get a bad press. No other part of speech incites such vitriol. In his skit on the vagaries of English grammar and the uses of adverbs in particular, Mark Twain writes: “I am dead to adverbs; they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference” (Twain, 1880, p. 850). Twain is not alone in excoriating this hapless part of speech. Stephen King wades in with

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs . . . they're like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day . . . fifty the day after that . . . and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. (King, 2000, p. 95)

The novelist/screenwriter Elmore Leonard caps this with his injunction: “If an adverb became a character in one of my books, I'd have it shot. Immediately” (D'Agostino, 2009, p. 86). Henry James is among the few to protest their worth: “I'm glad you like adverbs—I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect” (James, 1920, pp. 214–15). Although largely optional, if used purposefully, adverbs can add meaning to other clause elements, such as adjectives, other adverbs, nouns, verbs, even entire clauses. Ending an interview with the wife of a suspect, a detective enjoins: “‘Perhaps you would notify us, if he returns?’ ‘Oh definitely, surely, absolutely, no doubt about it’” (Furst, 2010, p. 23). Cull the adverbs (italicized) and the exchange comes to an ungainly halt: “‘You would notify us, if he returns?’ ‘Oh yes.’” The oblique command and the unease this engenders are gone. Syntactically mobile and semantically diverse, adverbs cover a range of meanings and grammatical functions; they are unique (adjectives excepted) in the number and variety that may co‐occur in a sentence, as the Furst extract demonstrates.

Adverbs can be used at best to marked effect; at worst, to create a verbal swamp. Their sheer diversity of use and function has earned them a maverick status as “the most nebulous and puzzling of the traditional word classes” (Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, & Svartvik, 1985, p. 438). Adverbs are heterogeneous: Their miscellany of assorted features has fueled the argument that, where a word cannot be assigned to another word class (such as noun, verb, adjective), it must be an adverb by default, rendering this a “catch‐all” or “residual” category (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002, p. 563). Such heterogeneity makes for considerable semantic and syntactic diversity—something of a linguistic smorgasbord or a “rag‐bag category” (Hasselgård, 2010, p. 3)! None of these assessments should bolster a negative view of their significance: “Adverbials are fascinating because of their enormous semantic and syntactic flexibility, as well as their elusiveness. In many ways a functional study of adverbials thus becomes a study of text and language in general” (Hasselgård, 2010, p. vii). In profiling their main features, this entry seeks to highlight the role and significance of adverbs for our everyday spoken or written communication. The examples that follow are given in italics, where the specific adverb(ial) in focus is also underlined: They listened attentively. Frequent reference is made to three state‐of‐the‐art grammars of contemporary English: Quirk et al. (1985); Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, and Finegan (1999); and Huddleston and Pullum (2002), and Hasselgård's (2010) major, up‐to‐date study on adverbials. The language examples used are mostly based on and derive from language corpora, particularly from the British National Corpus (hosted by Brigham Young University) (Davies, 2004) and the Brigham Young University 14 billion‐word iWeb Corpus (Davies, 2018) in order to provide examples that are as authentic as possible, even where these are edited to accord with the encyclopedic purpose of the entry.