Mostly I sit back and listen and watch the conversations on this listserve.
Lately, I've enjoyed the scope and sequence thread.  It's been thoughtful
and enlightening.  Because of the snow emergency today, I've stayed home to
work and just opened my e-mail, to find a conversation on adverbs and
complements.  Interesting again.  Adverbs are tough to define, tougher to
teach.  I can't remember now who said it, but one of the old linguists said
that all grammars "leak" at adverbs.  The reference was to the fact that no
matter how tight a grammatical system you build, the system won't be able
to contain the adverbs.  L.M. Meyers, in his history of the English
language text, said, tongue in cheek, that when you're analyzing a sentence
and you come to a constituent you can't identify, it's an adverb.  Tough
things these adverbs.

One reason that functional grammars are so daunting is that the roles nouns
play in sentences--agent, patient, receiver, etc., are all adverbial roles.
When we put the subject of a transitive verb into a "by" phrase, we call
that prepositional phrase an adverb of agency.  When we move the noun
phrase from the indirect object position, we put it in a prepositional
phrase with "to" or "for." The prep phrase functions as an adverb, a
perceptive receiver (dative).

In case grammar, Fillmore identified underlying roles--just as functional
grammarians do.  He posited a role-based deep structure which had only
verbs and nouns (in case-marked prepositional phrases).  These roles are
marked in inflectionally structured languages as cases.  In languages like
English, they either sit in subject or direct object positions, or they sit
in prepositional phrases.  In essence, these roles are adverbial.  So
perhaps Plato was right, that there are but two "parts of speech"--onema
and rhema, nouns and verbs (I don't think I spelled onema correctly).  But
if Plato was right (following Fillmore and the functional grammarians, and
contemporary binding and filtering theory) then he should have said that
the two parts of speech are really verbs and adverbs (adverbials?), nouns
in adverbial roles.

So, yes, I would analyze "next week," or "Thursday,"  or lots of other noun
phrases as nouns functioning like adverbs (adverbials?).

The question of whether they're complements.  Hmm!  A lot of old grammar
books call all noun phrases following verbs complements.  Certainly there
are verbs like "put" that MUST have a prepositional phrase to complete them.

We put the jars in the cabinet.
We stuck the poster on the wall.

I don't bring such verbs up in my book, but I would consider the
prepositional phrases (adverbs) to be complements.  I guess they
complement the verb.  And there probably are prep phrases that complement
other subclasses of verbs.  My mind is getting a bit fuzzy now.  It's after
11:30 p.m.

At any rate, I was hoping to bring two threads together in order to make
each a bit more clear.  I hope I succeeded.   And I hope the discussions
remain lively and thoughtful.    Good luck, Max

Max Morenberg, Professor
English Department
Miami University
Oxford, OH 45056

Ph: 513-529-2520
e-mail: [log in to unmask]