It might be useful here to distinguish (a) terms for kinds of
information (locational, temporal, etc.), (b) terms for kinds of
discourse (or rhetorical) purposes ("specifying which item is referred
to," "providing the circumstances under which something happened"), and
(c) terms for parts of speech. Terms like "adjectival" and "adverbial"
are on the border of (b), with some extrusions elsewhere. They're terms
for types of constructions that are primarily tied to discourse
function, so that, for example, a prepositional phrase can be labeled as
adjectival or adverbial depending on what it's doing. "Adjectives" and
"adverbs," as part-of-speech terms, are based on the notion that there
are classes of words that have a kind of "default" function, and that
adverbs have as a default function the specification of manner or
circumstance of action. The Latinate part-of-speech taxonomy doesn't
cope well with English words that seem to have several equally likely
default functions, and it doesn't deal with phrasal categories at all
(until the nineteenth century, there was almost no discussion of
multi-word units below the level of the sentence). 

The traditional school-grammar definitions, which in many cases are
essentially the same as ones used in medieval Latin grammars, recognize
some statistical trends, such as that locational information is very
frequently used to provide the circumstances of action -- but
overgeneralize the trend and create a major problem when they state it
as an ironclad rule. It's a bit like what would happen if we confused
"having been born in Tennessee" with "being currently located in
Tennessee," on the basis that a very large number of people currently in
Tennessee were born there. We'd make wrong predictions quite frequently
if near the Interstate, or Graceland, or attending a talk by Al Gore in
California. 


Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University

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