Re: Which part of speech?

On Wednesday, May 11, 2005, at 05:24 , Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:

> Andreas Johansson skrev:
>> Quoting Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>:
>>
>>
>> Andreas Johansson skrev:
[snip]
>>> Unfortunately I'm afraid 'adverbial' as a noun for a syntactic
>>> subdivision is a Swedish(TM) usage...
>>
>>
>> Ah. You seem to be right.
>>
>> Well, clearly, then, we've discovered a point where English could be
>> improved by
>> a Swedish loan!
>
> "Adverbial phrase" ought to be there already.  Otherwise I agree.
"Adverbial phrase" was here once upon a time when I was a youngster; it
meant any phrase which functioned as an adverb, such as "on the following
night". But this is now called a 'prepositional phrase'. Trask does not
even list the term 'adverbial phrase'; he does, however, list 'adverb
phrase' thus:
"A phrase whose lexical head is an adverb; _very quietly_, _right here_."

But you two Swedes may like to know that the adjective 'adverbial' ("of or
pertaining to adverbs") is also used as _noun_ in English as well. As a
noun it means:
"Any category with a distribution and a function similar to that of a
lexical adverb, such as _tomorrow night_, _in the garden_, _when she
arrives_ or _in order to find out_, regardless of its surface syntactic
realization, which may be that of a lexical adverb, an adverb phrase, a
prepositional phrase, an adverbial clause or a non-finite VP. The term
'adverbial' is thus a functional one."
[Trask]

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On Wednesday, May 11, 2005, at 06:36 , Christopher Wright wrote:

> Mass reply. I've started my second flamewar,
Hardly a flamewar - now you should see real flamewars   :)

[snip]
>> And in Latin:
>> Gregem legi proxima nocte group.ACC read.1sg.PF nearest.*ABL* night.*ABL*
{deep, deep blush} I feel so ashamed!!!

I've not long ago sent off an email to the list with _proximo nocte_ - ach!
  yes it should be _proximA nocte_. I must now go and write out 100 times:
"Nox is feminine and must have feminine agreement"

> Ablative's used with prepositions, too.
Umm - yes - but only with a few prepositions - most of 'em take the
accusative case. There are many uses of the ablative without a preposition.
  In any case, the temporal use of the ablative is thought to be inherited
from the older locative case which, for the most part (tho not entirely)
was absorbed into the ablative. Indeed, the _locative_  was still
occasionally found in Classical Latin with 'time' words, e.g.
useperi "in the evening" (ablative is "uespere")

The locative case is never governed by a preposition in Latin.

And for just "by night", the ablative 'nocte' is fairly rare in Classical
Latin. The usual form is a derived adverb _noctu_ ; but, oddly, the
nominative _nox_ was also found used as an adverb  :)

Ray
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
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as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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