Bruce,
Mea culpa as well – I should have been clearer in my original post. I’m using “adverb” for a part of speech, and “adverbial” for a functional category in a sentence (given my druthers, I’d use “adverbial” only for elements that modify a verb, but I usually bow to K-12 practice in class and using it for elements that modify other modifiers as well). I brought up phrasal units simply because taking the “adverbs answer when, where, how, or why” definition too seriously seems to be causing the same kinds of problems as with parts of speech.
I used examples like “Tuesday” in “the Tuesday meeting” because many linguists (I think!) would consider it a noun acting in an adjectival function, and traditional K-12 grammar would consider it an adjective – but neither would consider it an adverb. Your “triple-decker” system gives you a way to deal with the pre-nominal and post-nominal variations easily. I need to think about this more carefully (always a safe comment for me), but my initial reaction is to treat both the pre-nominal and post-nominal versions as adjectival, with the difference in interpretation being tied to the slot rather than to the word going in it (or more precisely, the difference being tied to the choice of slot). I suspect it’s relevant that many, if not most, of the distributional possibilities for “Tuesday” are the same as for “on Tuesday”; I could dodge by claiming that the post-nominal version is the object of an elliptical preposition, but I really, really don’t like ellipsis arguments.
Thanks,
Bill Spruiell
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce Despain
Sent: Wednesday, November 11, 2009 10:11 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Which via when
Mea culpa in spades. Syntax and semantics are intimately related with the same terms being used in both contexts. O, that the two were the same, and everything was cut and dry.
My take is that the term “adverb” is a category designation for words as a part of speech. If the question is about phrases, then the category is not named for its part of speech but for its functional intent in the sentence or clause at hand and this function might be syntactic or semantic. The examples of phrases, like “on Tuesday” would be adjectival when modifying a noun. The word “Tuesday” is itself a noun, object of the preposition in the example. In the sentence, “Our meeting Tuesday was a success,” it is the form of a noun, the name of a day of the week – now an adverbial noun as a part of speech (not one of the eight) – and makes it a modifier of the event noun “meeting.” This adverbial noun is then functioning as an adjective. But its position after the noun seems to be because of its adverbial nature. Compare this with, “Our Tuesday meeting was a success.” The adverbial noun is here also functioning as an adjective, but is in the normal attribute position. In the first example the modification was telling us when the meeting happened to be, but in the second case it was implying that the meeting was one of those that usually occur (every) Tuesday. The difference is that in one case the a. n. tells us which meeting by identifying its time, whereas in the other it tells us what kind of meeting it was by identifying its type. I would think that “the meeting Tuesday” is an a. n. being used as modification to a noun phrase containing a certain kind of noun, whereas “the Tuesday meeting” is more likely taken to be a derivative use of the adverb used as modification to that kind of noun – an adjective use of an a.n.
Taking this analysis further: “The place where I parked the car was very shady” has an adverbial phrase functioning as modification to certain kind of noun. Compare this to “Where I parked my car was very shady.” In the case of adjective clauses, such as, “The car that I drive broke down,” we also have a parallel noun use, “My car is what I broke down.” (I think Herb argues that the former is a really a noun clause used as a relative.) In “The place was very shady where I parked my car,” the same clause is adverbial. The category of “where” as a part of speech is an adverb, but it introduces clauses that may function as adjective, adverbial, or noun clause. In every case the semantics relates “where” to place usually in space but sometimes in time or even condition: “We must be careful where BJ is concerned.”
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Spruiell, William C
Sent: Tuesday, November 10, 2009 6:16 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Which via when
Erin,
Yep, some of them want to say those are adverbs. In their defense, I should add that many of them haven’t encountered much in the way of discussions of grammar since 6th grade. I don’t know how much of this is a reflex of actual limitations in their former textbooks, and how much is from the way long-term memory erodes complications. Some of the texts I have looked at, though, did appear set up an absolute equation between “location or time information” and “adverb.” Part of it, I suspect, results naturally from the fact that when authors make up examples for a textbook, they tend to create ones that conform nicely to the definition.
As you’d expect, this causes even more of a problem when the students are deciding whether a prepositional phrase or an embedded clause is adjectival or adverbial (e.g. “The place *where I parked the car* was very shady”).
Thanks,
Bill Spruiell
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Erin Karl
Sent: Tuesday, November 10, 2009 6:06 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Which via when
Do you mean that in those sentence examples your college students would say that Monday, north, etc., are adverbs? Good grief! That's what you get when the focus of grammar instruction is completely on the "definition" of the parts of speech and that's it.
I have seen plenty of texts and curricula do that, but I know of at least one (mine) that doesn't.
Erin
________________________________
From: "Spruiell, William C" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Tue, November 10, 2009 5:11:03 PM
Subject: Which via when
This is just a quick informal survey-type question: For those of you teaching K-12, how many times have you seen a textbook pointing out that people frequently use information about time or place in order to specify which thing they’re talking about (e.g. “The meeting *on Thursday* was longer than the one on Monday,” or “She headed for the *north* pasture”)? Many of my college students have quite firmly internalized the notion that adverbs “tell you where, when, why, or how,” but don’t remember ever seeing limitations put on that of definition. They think about it as if it’s some kind of fundamental law of the universe, and some of the K-12 textbooks I’ve looked at seem to be presenting it that way. My institution’s “instructional media” collection is mostly from the 80s and early 90s, though, so I can’t tell if things have improved or not.
Thanks,
Bill Spruiell
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