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]