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A Word, Please: See if your adverbial is a member of the adverb club

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Recently, I mentioned in a column that adverbs aren’t just those “ly” words that modify verbs.

They’re a much larger group, including words that answer the questions “when,” “where” and “in what manner?” So in “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I explained, the word “tomorrow” is an adverb because it’s answering the question “when?”

This didn’t sit right with a reader named Jim: “By your logic,” Jim wrote, “in this sentence — ‘I’ll see you Monday’ — ‘Monday’ is an adverb, just like ‘tomorrow’ is an adverb in your example simply because it answers the question ‘when.’ And, since it answers the question ‘where,’ by your logic, ‘Albany’ is an adverb in the sentence ‘I live in Albany.’ I’m sorry, but a noun is a noun is a noun.”

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Without realizing it, Jim had asked a mouthful. Understanding how “tomorrow,” “Monday” and “in Albany” function in these examples gets a little complicated. But confirming whether “tomorrow” is indeed an adverb is much easier. Just look it up.

Merriam-Webster’s classifies it as an adverb. So do Webster’s New World College Dictionary and the American Heritage Dictionary. So “tomorrow” is indisputably an adverb, at least in sentences like “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

But look up “Monday” in the same dictionaries and you stumble across a fascinating fact: “Monday” is not an adverb. How is it possible that the last word in “I’ll see you tomorrow” and “I’ll see you Monday” are two different parts of speech? The answer lies in the difference between word classes and syntactical functions.

A “word class,” in its strictest definition, is a label. It’s like a club. Many, if not most, words in the dictionary have more than one word class. (“Walk,” for example, can be a verb or a noun.) Lexicographers make these determinations — they decide who’s in the “club” of any given word class — based on frequency of usage. “Tomorrow” functions as an adverb frequently enough that lexicographers think it deserves membership in the word class. “Monday,” apparently, does not.

“Adverbial” refers to a syntactical function. An adverbial can be an adverb, a prepositional phrase, a clause, or a noun phrase that answers the question “when,” “where” or “in what manner?”

So in “I’ll see you this week,” the noun phrase “this week” is an adverbial. In “I’ll see you Monday,” the noun phrase (and yes, in syntactical analysis, single words are classed as phrases) “Monday” is an adverbial.

The only question that remains is: Can we use the word “adverb” to include single-word nouns functioning as adverbials the way Monday does in Jim’s example? That’s harder to say. I’m inclined to say yes, especially as I look at Merriam-Webster’s definition of “adverb” and see that it can be used as a synonym of “adverbial.”

So can we call “Monday” an adverb when it’s functioning as an adverbial? Reasonable people could debate that. But there’s no denying that “tomorrow” is an adverb or that “Monday” is functioning as an adverbial in Jim’s sentence.

The example “I live in Albany” is different. Jim’s right. “Albany” here is a noun. But it’s part of an adverbial: the whole prepositional phrase “in Albany.”

In this phrase, you have the preposition “in” and the object of the preposition, “Albany.” The object of a preposition is pretty much always either a noun or a pronoun. But the prepositional phrase is itself an adverbial because it’s answering the question “where?”

Again, this all hinges on understanding the difference between adverbs and adverbials — between word clubs and word jobs. The important thing to know is that different parts of speech, including nouns and prepositional phrases, can function adverbially, even if they’re not official members of the adverb club.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.

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