Adverbs are the ‘mixed bag’ among the word classes, today comprising such diverse items as time, space or manner adverbs (PDE now, here, quickly), intensifiers (PDE very, terribly) or stance (PDE surely, frankly) and linking adverbs (PDE however, therefore). After a rough sketch of the formal developments in adverbs, in particular the emergence and establishment of the adverbial suffix –ly by re-analysis, this chapter will show that the functional heterogeneity within today’s English adverbs is a rather recent development. Overall, we see semantic and functional diversification in the category ‘adverb’, gradually becoming more varied in signalling epistemic, evidential and textual speaker attitudes. This diversification is here seen to have been supported by the new distinct mark of adverbial status, the adverbial suffix –ly.

Verbs are typically the most grammatically complicated and diverse constituents within any clause structure. The information presented in this chapter is not intended to be an exhaustive resource; rather, my goal is to introduce foundational concepts that can support your own research of additional features. The first section introduces tense and aspect, two key types of inflections that occur with verbs, and mood and evidential marking are introduced in the second section. The third section explores negation strategies and auxiliary verbs, while the fourth dives into valency-changing inflections, including the passive voice. By the end of this chapter, you will have made decisions about marking verbs in clause structures and will be able to translate basic clauses into your language.

There is evidence that the elements that take part in word-formation, whether as a derivational base, in conversion or in compounds, are adverbs rather than prepositions. Even then, the irregularity and restricted productivity of forms involving these elements is striking, and hard to understand.

Although adjectives typically denote properties, that’s not definitive. The distinctive properties of prototypical adjectives are gradability inflection for comparative and superlative. Adjective phrases (AdjPs) function as predicative complements and modifiers in nominals, though some specialize in one of these. AdjPs take adverbs, notably ‘very’, as modifiers. These properties generally distinguish them from nouns and verbs which can be useful in fused modifier-heads or with overlap, as in ‘it’s flat’ vs ‘I have a flat’. AdjPs differ from DPs in always being omissible from an NP, while a DP in determiner function is often required. Also DPs, but not AdjP can occur in as a fused head in a partitive construction. AdjPs also occur as supplements, here differing from PPs in that AdjPs typically have a predicand that is the subject of the main clause. Like most other phrases, AdjPs allow complements, usually PPs or subordinate clauses.

The adverb category is the most heterogenous in the properties of its members. Many adverbs are formed from adjectives using the ‘⋅ly’ suffix, but AdvPs don’t function as attributive modifiers in nominals and rarely function as or allow complements.

Germanic languages heavily rely on prepositions and particles (‘Ps’) for describing places and paths. This category P might be considered as a small class of minor function words, but this chapter demonstrates the richness and variety of this category on the basis of Dutch, English, and German data, focusing on two of their aspects that have not received much attention in the literature: transitivity and complexity. Given that Ps are always based on a spatial relation (between a figure and a ground), it is surprising to see that they can often be used, under specific semantic conditions, without a syntactic object that expresses the ground, even as prepositions. A close look at the variation in formal complexity of Ps shows the same semantic conditions at work, revealing a basic gradient of meaning that cross-cuts the distinction between places and paths and prepositions and particles.

Applies the syntactic structure discussed in the previous chapters to an analysis of the first sentence of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.Compares this structure to the over 5 million alternatives she might have written, to demonstrate why her formulation is better than any of them.

Extends discussion of ambiguity with adverbs in infinitival constructions to a similar ambiguity involving relative clauses, where a single linear order can be assigned two distinct hierarchical structures that support distinct interpretations. Another adverbial ambiguity involves verb phrases where the verb is modified by two adverbs, one to the left and one to the right of the verb – a single linear order with two distinct hierarchical structures. Displacing an adverb to the front of a clause eliminates the potential ambiguity. This constraint on displacement applies also to direct yes/no-questions where the displaced auxiliary can only be interpreted as modifying the main clause verb. The syntax of direct yes/no-questions requires an auxiliary do when the corresponding indicative contains only a finite main verb. This auxiliary occurs also in tag questions, verb phrase ellipsis, and wh-interrogatives, with an interrogative pronoun at the front of the clause. A syntactic analysis of yes/no- and wh-questions discusses wh-displacement in other constructions (clefts, pseudo-clefts, and headless relatives).