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First question: I have been reading English: An Essential Grammar by Gerald Nelson and it gives an example of the words 'hard' and 'fast' being used as both adjectives and adverbs:

Adverb:

John works hard.

Peter drives fast.

Adjective:

John is used to hard work.

Peter drives a fast car.

I was wondering, can all adjectives be used as adverbs in this manner?

E.g.

Adjective:

Small girl.

Are these adverbs???

She is small.

She was small.

She looked small.

Second question: Can present participle verbs be considered as adjectives?

E.g. Are these adjectives or are they still considered as verbs?

The singing lady.

The growing crowd.

The advancing army.

Third question: Can all past participle verbs be considered adjectives?

E.g.

The written book.

The cooked fish.

The bitten apple.

And lastly: Can all past participle verbs be considered as adverbs?

E.g.

The book was written in black ink.

The fish seemed to be cooked.

herisson
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Sid
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  • (A) One question at a time, please - and check for duplicates. (0) Certainly not. (1) They are (in these sentences) predicative adjectives following link verbs (look these up). (2 & 3) Look up 'participial adjectives' (here or on the internet). (4) 'cooked' is a participial adjective here. 'was written' is almost certainly a passive verb construction (The book was written by Dickens = Dickens wrote the book). – Edwin Ashworth Oct 21 '15 at 08:41

1 Answers1

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  • Not all adjectives have a natural adverbial use. I'd think you'd be hard pressed to use beautiful where beautifully is called for.
  • In "She is small," small is an adjective serving as a nominative complement. It's not an adverb.
  • It might be best to consider participles as verb forms that have uses as modifiers. When they modify nouns, that's an adjectival use, but it really doesn't make them adjectives. An adjective (say, red) may be compared (to get redder). That won't work for cooked. You'll have to say "more cooked."
  • I don't have time to search for a past participle that can't have an adjectival use. Most can.
  • In "the book was written", written is part of the past passive; it's not a modifier. You can tell because you can sensibly append a prepositional phrase with by to give who wrote the book. Similarly, "to be cooked" might be passive infinitive if you're concerned about who did the cooking. Same test. If you're concerned with the internal temperature, then it would be a participial modifier.
  • Past participles have adverbial (or at least semi-adverbial) uses: "He lived cursed by fate." The participle would say (at least in part) how he lived.
deadrat
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  • +1 Phew, an answer that doesn't mix up the parts of speech with the grammatical functions. Hooray! Small niggle though (can't help it), doesn't the passive use the past participle form of the verb? (usually with the auxiliary BE) – Araucaria - Him Oct 21 '15 at 12:40
  • @Araucaria It's a hard habit to break after those grade-school teachers finished pounding the parts of speech into my skull. And remember that I learned this stuff when Grendl was a pup, shortly after the language lost most of its inflections. Can you recommend a book for the recovering grammar student? It's better to make this right rather than worry about a niggle. What's a better way to say it? The past participle written with the auxiliary BE forms the passive voice of the verb and thus carries no modifying sense? – deadrat Oct 21 '15 at 17:22
  • @Rathony Oh, you're back. I had hoped that your faux pas on the "washed" comment in the "Meaning of 'whether'" answer thread would have led you to keep a low profile for a while. A hope, fond and dashed. – deadrat Oct 22 '15 at 04:24
  • @Rathony You always have a choice between ignorance and knowledge. Your choice is clear, and it obviates any need for an apology. – deadrat Oct 22 '15 at 04:31
  • @Rathony Since the law reserved its penalties for the seller and not the buyer, there are plenty of words for the seller, and few for the buyer. Are you really unclear on this? And what on earth does it have to do with adjectives used as adverbs? – deadrat Oct 22 '15 at 04:55
  • @Rathony Wow! You really are confused, aren't you? When the Swedes changed the law, they no doubt used a Swedish term, which when translated into English became "sex buyer", which has taken some currency in the Anglophone world. Try to concentrate. – deadrat Oct 22 '15 at 05:03
  • @Rathony By the way, there's a difference between a legal opinion and an opinion about the law. You might want to look it up. – deadrat Oct 22 '15 at 05:04
  • @Rathony On chat a few minutes ago. – deadrat Oct 22 '15 at 06:03
  • @Araucaria '[A]n answer that doesn't mix up the parts of speech with the grammatical functions.' But a large part of assigning POS's in modern analyses involves determining what role words play in context. It's nonsense to say 'fast is an adjective' without qualification. – Edwin Ashworth Feb 19 '16 at 10:18
  • @EdwinAshworth Not really, what we're doing in that instance is deciding which word 'fast' we're talking about. – Araucaria - Him Feb 19 '16 at 10:39
  • @Araucaria Yes, really. 'He drives fast': 'fast' adverb because it describes the manner of driving (ie POS and grammatical function inextricably linked. 'He drives a fast car': 'fast' adjective because it describes a property of the referent 'car'. How can an unqualified " 'Fast' is a verb " say be taken seriously? POS depends on grammatical function. // The first two 'fast's are intercategorial polysemes; the verb is probably best considered a homonym, though it seems to have a common origin. – Edwin Ashworth Feb 19 '16 at 10:56
  • @EdwinAshworthHmmm. No, I don't think that's a good way of putting it. It's upside down. What (many) different functions a word can do depend on its part of speech. Notice that adverbs, adjectives, verbs and nouns (or rather phrases headed by them) can all be Subjects for example. So we could have a sentence with either the noun fast, the verb fast or the adjective fast [notice that these are three different lexemes, not one item] – Araucaria - Him Feb 19 '16 at 11:32
  • @EdwinAshworth ... (sorry, forgot to finish that sentence) ... : So we could have a sentence with either the noun fast, the verb fast or the adjective fast is the Subject. – Araucaria - Him Feb 19 '16 at 13:11
  • @Araucaria NO. John Lawler stresses the primacy of constructions (context): 'First, and most important, asking what part of speech a particular word is tells you nothing about it, or about grammar, or about English. Nothing. Even if you get an answer. It's the wrong question.' ... 'just about every word in English can be any part of speech. [Plus, people rarely ask this unless] they're ... – Edwin Ashworth Feb 19 '16 at 15:54
  • using old incorrect lists of The Eight Parts Of Speech, which don't work for English. English grammar is not a big bag of words; it's Constructions.' Part of speech (if one considers this a useful concept) is determined by how a word is used, not what a dictionary label may say (and even major dictionaries disagree, on determiners say) or on what letter the word begins with etc. – Edwin Ashworth Feb 19 '16 at 15:55
  • No adverbs have 'a natural adverbial use'. There are flat adverbs, adverbs which have the same form as the corresponding adjectives, but they are intercategorial polysemes and arguably different words. – Edwin Ashworth Feb 19 '16 at 15:57
  • @EdwinAshworth I've never consulted a dictionary for a part of speech definition in my life, and I'm not going to start now. People who use the term noun phrase for anything that is a Subject of course do not get reliable info about what words and phrases can be used for. John's dislike of PoS of course varies quite considerably depending on what the topic of the current conversation is. The grammatical functions that a word can have are a small part of determining their PoS. There's lots of other considerations. – Araucaria - Him Feb 19 '16 at 16:00
  • @EdwinAshworth Nonetheless, it is a relief, as I still maintain, to see an answer that can distinguish between being a Modifier and being an adverb, just as it is when we see people being able to distinguish between being a Subject and being a noun. – Araucaria - Him Feb 19 '16 at 16:00
  • @EdwinAshworth To illustrate the point "Fast is how I'd like you to drive", "Fast is what I want you to do" "Fasts are bad for your health". In each case fast is the Subject of the sentence, but the word (heading the phrase) that does that job is a different PoS in each case. And in each case it is the PoS that gives us predictable information about the behaviour of the word. For example, the verb can be preceded by the infinitival marker to. The adverb can enter into a superlative construction. The noun will be preceded by a determiner if we make it singular. ... – Araucaria - Him Feb 20 '16 at 11:17
  • @EdwinAshworth "Faster is how I'd like you to drive!", "To fast is what I want", "A fast is bad for your health". – Araucaria - Him Feb 20 '16 at 11:20
  • But context – '[is] how', '[what I want you to] do' and 'are bad' – determine the PoS in each case. As you point out, realisations of the subject are not confined to noun phrases. If I discover a torn-off piece of paper with a parallel discussion between other language students (these sentence structures aren't colloquial!), with the words 'Fast is' before the tear, I could reasonably guess that this is a subject, but not what PoS is involved. – Edwin Ashworth Feb 20 '16 at 15:48
  • @EdwinAshworth Yes, that's not surprising though because we're talking about homonyms! We always need context to decipher which homonym we're talking about. (bwt, won't get pinged if you don't @ me!) – Araucaria - Him Feb 20 '16 at 23:25
  • But words don't exist in isolation. The grammatical context determines what the part of speech is (thus 'sightsaw' must be a verb in 'We sightsaw Rome' (qv); the word didn't exist some years ago). – Edwin Ashworth Feb 21 '16 at 15:48