Re: Looking for a case: counting

Andreas Johansson wrote at 2004-02-15 20:40:16 (+0100)
 > Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:
 >
 > > "Adverbs" are just noun phrases in some local, temporal,
 > > instrumental (or other such cases) case.
 >
 > I must say I find it more intuitive to think of oblique noun cases
 > (incl oblique uses of core cases) as adverbs. Partly because seeing
 > "well" as "with goodness" or something of the sort feels terribly
 > pointless.
 >
 > According to how they taught us grammar back in school, your
 > example "with a hammer" is not an adverb, the term being restricted
 > to morphology. The thing would have been said to be formally a
 > prepositional phrase and functionally an _adverbial_ (dunno English
 > term).
 >
 > Now, all of this is a question of terminoloy, but the distinction
 > between "adverb" (form) and _adverbial_ (function) seems useful to
 > me.

The following extract may prove of interest:

 | Adverb is a "catch-all" category.  Any word with semantic content
 | (i.e., other than grammatical particles) that is not clearly a
 | noun, a verb or an adjective is often put into the class of adverb.
 | Semantically, forms that have been called adverbs cover an
 | extremely wide range of concepts.  For this reason they cannot be
 | identified in terms of time stability or any other well-defined
 | semantic parameter.  Also, they typically function on the clause or
 | discourse level, i.e., their semantic effect (scope) is relevant to
 | entire clauses or larger units rather than simply to phrases.  As
 | with adjectives, there are no prototypical adverbs.  Formally,
 | adverbs can be characterised in terms of their distribution.
	Payne, _Describing Morphosyntax_, section 3.4, p.69