English is always evolving with some new concepts that remain largely undeveloped and one such concept is that of ‘adverbial’. As basic and as self-explanatory as it may sound, this topic is causing great concern across various levels of education. I have met with experts in the English discipline who themself encounter issues trying to discern between an adverb and an adverbial when faced with the depth of the topic.
I have also seen textbooks emit uncertainty about the term. In one such instance, adverbial was defined the same way as adverb. All these threw me off balance hence my research and inferences on the topic.
To begin with, many of us learnt that adverbials are phrases or clauses modifying a verb, another adverb or adjective (or even an entire statement) in a sentence. Emphasis should be placed on adverbials not being taught to be a word but rather a group of words in its early days.
Time went by and a lot changed—adverbials started taking several forms to the point that they are hardly distinguishable from adverbs, so the problem emerged:
What truly are adverbials and how are they different from adverbs?
All adverbials are adverbs but not all adverbs are adverbials. I was holding just the opposite thought until I brought technicality into my analysis; I was thinking ‘come on, a word has to be an adverb before it can be considered an adverbial.’ I arrived at this thinking considering the superficial build of the word: adverb + ial.
On the contrary, I should have considered that adverbial means ‘relating to or having to do with an adverb,’ as is the case with parent + al, which means relating to a parent. Taking the ‘parental’ example, it would be logical to say that, ‘The little boy gives his younger siblings parental care,’ even though the boy is not a parent.
So, the overall idea denotes that what is shown is related to some characteristic features of the base word ‘parent’ or ‘adverb.’
For example, while you’ll not find anywhere in your book that ‘at school’ itself is an adverb, it actually does perform the function of an adverb of place, talking about ‘where’ in the sentence: She ate some of the oranges at school.
Note: Although the word ‘at’ is primarily a preposition and your dictionary is unlikely to ever classify it as an adverb, it serves this capacity by telling us something about the verb ‘ate’ in the examined sentence example.
Some other examples include:
- Tolu bought a kitten this morning.
- Ngozi did her job with great care.
But there is another side to the coin that I seldom hear people speak of. Phrases themselves are not necessarily a group of words. And you want to agree with me that here is where the major problem lies, hence we always wait to hear ‘phrase’ or ‘clause (being a group of words, too)’ when adverbial is mentioned. We are familiar with ‘adverbial phrases,’ ‘relative clauses,’ etc…
In English, there are now one-word phrases. Although difficult to determine, you could fish these kinds of phrases out on the basis of their function in the sentence—they are basically important single-units in every family of words.
For example, ‘daily’ is both an adverbial (doing the job of an adverb) and an adverb in the sentence: I run daily. ‘Daily’ there acts as a one-word phrase—if we must classify it as a unit. If not, it is an adverbial in any case.
Some other examples are:
- She left the party angrily.
- Anjola sings beautifully.
I wanted to add that, ‘I brush my teeth everyday’ but everyday is not a word, it is ‘every day’.
With this understanding, it is hoped that you will have gotten a full grasp of the term ‘adverbial’; it could be one word (in alignment with the conventional sense of ‘adverb’) or more than a word (which is technically unlike ‘adverbs’). This perfectly fits the new definition of adverbials.
Leave a Reply