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Adjective Vs Adverb

de ailebol, 2009-julio-22

Mesaĝoj: 63

Lingvo: English

mnlg (Montri la profilon) 2009-julio-23 13:34:07

Ceigered, thanks for your reply.

It is to be said that Wikipedia mentions the use of a- to create adverbs:
Some adverbs are formed from nouns or adjectives by appending the prefix a- (such as abreast, astray)
I browsed a few examples in my head (away, ahead, ...) and in general I thought that all those words seem to describe a state of being, more than a state of the person. However I will of course trust a native speaker who has a grasp of grammar okulumo.gif

Miland (Montri la profilon) 2009-julio-23 14:50:05

ailebol:In the sentence "This soap gets the clothes completely clean", my son says the word completely is an adjective because it modifies the noun clean. How is that possible since the word ends in "ly"?
Your son (if you quoted him correctly) should have said that the word 'completely' is an adverb because it modifies the adjective 'clean'. words ending in 'ly' are adverbs when they qualify adjectives. Here's a wiki page that may help.

In Esperanto adverbs end in -e, adjectives in -a. Thus vere is 'truly' or 'really' but vera is 'real' or 'true'.

mnlg (Montri la profilon) 2009-julio-23 15:10:42

Miland: however, "clean" is not a noun, it is an adjective. "cleanness" or "cleanliness" are nouns. You can get a noun out of "clean" if you append "one", i.e. "the clean one looked best".

Miland (Montri la profilon) 2009-julio-23 15:54:37

mnlg:Miland: however, "clean" is not a noun, it is an adjective.
You're right, I should have read it more carefully. The son should have said "the word completely is an adverb because it modifies the adjective clean." I've revised the previous post.

andogigi (Montri la profilon) 2009-julio-23 22:15:34

darkweasel:Wow, English speakers also have problems with that? I always thought this was restricted to German speakers like me.
Oh no, we commonly have problems with this. My favorite mixup is "well" and "good". "Good" is an adjective, and "well" is an adverb. Sometimes, I get the feeling that "good" is colloquially also becoming an adverb simply because of the huge number of people that don't know how to use it properly.

For example:

"He speaks good Esperanto very well." is grammatically correct, although superfluous.

However, you'd be surprised at the number of people who will say "He speaks Esperanto good". This is not correct since "good" is not an adverb. It is just one of those strange quirks of English that the two words are derived from different roots.

I've also noticed this mistake committed more in the states than in Britain, Canada, or Down Under. Can anyone confirm this and perhaps comment on why? It is one of my pet peeves.

Pharoah (Montri la profilon) 2009-julio-23 22:20:49

Yeah, I've noticed this. I always thought it was an American thing, too. The error that bothers me the most, though is when people say things like "There's books on the shelf.". People I know make this mistake a lot, and these are native speakers we're talking about.

ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2009-julio-24 07:56:09

Andogigi, technically "good" being used as an adverb is not a problem, remembering that the native and original (before the development of '-ly' and evolution of 'a-' etc) way to make an adverb in English would have been to simply use an adjective. So, when you get down to the heart of our little Western Germanic language, 'good' should still be able to be used as an adverb lango.gif.
It's just that we somehow ended up with about 10 different words meaning 'good' in English and our poets somehow assigned different uses to them all just to confuse the populace ridulo.gif

BTW a bit off topic but for those wondering I just started researching where all our different forms for 'good' came from - interesting results..

Good -> (no continuity)
Braw (scots, guessing related to swedish 'bra') -> (no continuity)

Bataz -> Batiza -> Batistaz
Bet -> betera -> betest
(n/a) -> better -> best

and 'well' (or will as it appears in the protogermanic dictionary) seems to have a much looser meaning, sort of something in between 'good', 'beneficial' and a positive intensifier opposite to 'not'.

http://rlongman1.googlepages.com/protoger.html

And mnlg you do have good point there, I guess they are states of being. I guess though that when you look very deeply into these things with natlangs, you start to see the borders between different lexical-classes become blurred lango.gif

andogigi (Montri la profilon) 2009-julio-24 11:27:12

ceigered:Andogigi, technically "good" being used as an adverb is not a problem, remembering that the native and original (before the development of '-ly' and evolution of 'a-' etc) way to make an adverb in English would have been to simply use an adjective.
Now you've got me wondering... I'm on the road right now, so I don't have my dictionaries with me. I checked dictionary.com
(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/good) and they say it is used "adverbally" rido.gif in an informal way. Now I'm wondering if it has always been this way or if this is a recent concession. I wish I had my library in my hotel room so I could check it out. senkulpa.gif From what you're saying, it appears that maybe English is changing to make it "improper" usage and the change hasn't been accomplished yet.

andogigi (Montri la profilon) 2009-julio-24 11:33:47

Wow, this is interesting... It appears that "good" is colloquially accepted as an adverb in certain instances and not in others.

Acceptable:
I feel good.
You look good today.
Breakfast smells good.

Unacceptable:
He plays baseball good.
He speaks really good.

I wonder how that happenned??? I can't seem to find any rules governing this usage. Somedays, I feel sorry for foreigners trying to learn our language.

mnlg (Montri la profilon) 2009-julio-24 12:11:32

andogigi:I feel good.
You look good today.
Breakfast smells good.
Those are not adverbs. In each of these three cases, if I substitute 'good' with nice, ugly, fine, terrible, etc, all of them adjectives, it still sounds okay.

In Italian grammar (if I remember correctly), those would be called 'attributes of the subject'. I have no idea how they are called in English, I'm afraid.

There are also attributes of the object. For instance in the sentence "I found the phone broken", "broken" is an adjective related to "phone". But it is more than that; it is an attribute. If it was a simple adjective, you'd have said "I found the broken phone", which does not mean the same thing. In Esperanto, you would have said, respectively, mi trovis la telefonon rompita, or mi trovis la telefonon rompitan.
Somedays, I feel sorry for foreigners trying to learn our language.
I appreciate that ridulo.gif

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