Re: Adjectives, Adverbs, Ad...

Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:

> Prepositions might appear to be modified in, e.g. "Has it gone right into
> the ground?" "Nope, it's only halfway in the hole" etc. But the
> traditional explanation is that the adverbs "right" and "half-way" are
> modifying other adverbs here, i.e. the phrases "into the ground" and "in
> the hole" function as adverbs. Indeed, we were taught in the 50s that they
> were "adverbial phrases"; the modern terminology seems to be
> "prepositional phrase", naming the phrase by the word introducing it and
> not by its function.
My impression is that both terms are used, the former when considering the
phrase's role on the sentence level, the later when considering it's internal
structure (clause syntax vs phrasal syntax, essentially).

Additionally, there supposedly are non-adverbial prepositional phrases. An
example is supposedly to be seen in "He was eating of the cake", where the
prepositional phrase is a sort of object (analyzed as elliptical for "pieces
of the cake? That'd make it adjectival.).

                                                       Andreas