o a class of notional words [Smirnitsky, Barkhudarov, Ilish]
o General semantics: give a characteristic of another characteristic
o They cover a wide range of semantic categories. Their major semantic groups are:
| Circumstantial Adverbs denote the circumstances of an action named by a Verb → Adverbs of Place, Time, etc. | Qualitative Adverbs ↓ ↓ |
| modify a quality named by an Adj or Adv → Adverbs of Degree (Intensifiers and Downtoners) | qualify an action named by a Verb → Adverbs of Manner |
o Morphological categories:
- form only the category of Degrees of Comparison which is only partially realised by a limited group of Qualitative Adverbs. It is formed:
1. synthetically:
(1a) suppletive forms
(1b) forms homonymous with the cognate adjective forms ( + -er, -est)
2. syntactically (more, most)
o Syntactic functions:
- the Adverbial / Adjunct to a Verb
- the Adverbial Modifier to an Adj / Adv
- sometimes the Attribute to a Noun which can stand either in postposition or in preposition to it
o a very heterogeneous class whose field overlaps with fields of other lexical-grammatical classes - Prepositions and Conjunctions. Some of them are homonymous though they perform different syntactic functions