the statement 'nothing can be known' seems straightforward, right? 'nothing' is the subject, in which case the statement can be taken to mean that not a single thing can be known. and yet, is there a way of taking the 'nothing' as adverbial, to qualify the ability to know, such that the statement negatively qualifies the ability to know?
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I think what you are getting at is that the negation in "nothing can be known" is clausal in scope. It means "There is not anything that can be known". I don't think this means that nothing is "adverbial", though: it is a negative indefinite pronoun.
It might be possible to argue that part of nothing is "adverbial" (with the remaining part being pronominal), but I'm not really sure. If we split "nothing" into "no" and "thing", we can call the first part a "negative quantifier". Then the question remains of whether "no" could itself be analyzed as containing syntactic structure: this seems to be debated (I found a paper "On the syntactically complex status of negative indefinites", by Hedde Zeijlstra (2011) that argues that the negative and indefinite meanings should in fact be analyzed as distinct syntactic elements).
The fact that English doesn't include the usual marker of predicate negation ("not") in sentences like this is fairly unusual from a global point of view. Languages where clausal negation can be marked entirely on a negative indefinite pronoun are apparently concentrated in two regions of the world: Western Europe and Mesoamerica ("Negative Indefinite Pronouns and Predicate Negation", by Martin Haspelmath (2013), in The World Atlas of Language Structures Online).
herisson
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thank you for this. would you say that the only way to make sense of the statement is to take 'nothing' as a negative indefinite pronoun? or is there some other way? – user327187 Dec 07 '18 at 15:00
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@user327187: "Nothing" is categorized as a pronoun because of how it behaves syntactically. As you mentioned in your question, it occupies the "subject" slot in your example sentence: I don't think there's any way an adverbial could do that. But part of speech categorizations don't necessarily have any close correspondence to the meaning of a word. – herisson Dec 07 '18 at 15:08
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@user327187: Update: I found a paper that argues that "nothing" and similar words may be syntactically complex, and contain as one element a negative "operator" that might be along the lines of what you meant when you proposed taking it as "adverbial". Although I appreciate the checkmark, I think it may have been a bit premature to award it to my answer: you could take it back and wait a day or two to see if anyone else will post a different answer with more information. – herisson Dec 07 '18 at 15:31
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thank you for the update. would be able to share a link to the paper? – user327187 Dec 07 '18 at 15:47
Otherwise, 'Nothing can be known…' is part of a statement, which must be followed by "about/of/on the subject of…" or some such, right?
In English as opposed to philosophy, the subject is not 'Nothing'; the subject is whatever nothing can be known about….
Either way, how might your own research or conclusions allow taking 'nothing' as adverbial, or qualifying the ability to know and even then, where did "negatively" come into anything?
– Robbie Goodwin Dec 08 '18 at 00:57