Grammatical function of "all"

Question

I wonder what’s the grammatical function of “all” in the following sentence?

“We all felt ill after the meal.”

“All” can function as four different grammatical roles, I mean: adverb, determiner, predeteminer, and pronoun. But in the sentence it comes after a pronoun so it cannot be a determiner, predeterminer, or pronoun. So is it an adverb in the sentence?

You may want to read this related thread: https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/76622/can-an-adverb-modify-nouns-pronouns — Cardinal, May 09 '20 at 16:53
From ELU - This has come up before here. "All" in these examples is a floated quantifier, produced by the transformation "Quantifier Float". If that helps. Me, I'd just call it an "optional intensifier" for *we. It has also been asked about on ELL, but I'm not sure how helpful that* answer will be either. — FumbleFingers, May 09 '20 at 16:55
(Dictionaries wouldn't normally get down to such details. To them it'll just be an adjective / determiner.) — FumbleFingers, May 09 '20 at 17:01
"All" belongs to the word class (part of speech) 'determinative'. In your example it functions as an adjunct in clause structure. — BillJ, May 09 '20 at 18:36

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 09 '20 at 16:58

1

The simplest way to parse this is to consider "we all" to a compound pronoun.

The two words have been brought together and now function as a single "word", although the spelling doesn't (yet) reflect this (y'all is sometimes seen for you all)

As such "all" isn't functioning on its own, but "we all" is functioning as a pronoun.

answered May 09 '20 at 16:58

James K

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I guess this is also a "valid" way to categorise the collocation. But it doesn't cover *We each agreed to participate.* – FumbleFingers May 09 '20 at 17:07
I think you're confusing it with the compound pronoun found in, for example, "They invited us all" / "she likes you all", where the two are inseparable. But in the OP's example they are separable, thus "all" is an adjunct in clause structure. – BillJ May 09 '20 at 18:50

BillJ · Answer 2 · 2020-05-09T18:53:22.810

We all felt ill after the meal.

"All" belongs to the word class (part of speech) 'determinative'.

In your example, "all" is separable and not part of the subject NP but a quantificational adjunct in clause structure.

This is evident from the fact that when the verb is an auxiliary it preferentially follows rather than precedes it:

We had all felt ill after the meal.

Note also the possibility of inserting an adjunct after the pronoun:

We certainly all felt ill after the meal.

Grammatical function of "all"

2 Answers2