While other parts of speech have rules governing where they are placed – for example, verbs need to be the first or second element in a sentence – adverbs can float around quite happily. Often we use them at the start (as you can see where the adverb often is used in this sentence) to
Comparing adverbs In the same way that we can compare adjectives, we can compare adverbs. When we have two actions being compared, we use the comparative form of the adverb. When three or more actions are compared, we use the superlative form of the adverb. For short (one-syllable) adverbs – which tend to the irregular
I think it reveals something about the background of many Australian writers and probably also their editors and publishers that they do not know the difference between concrete and cement. When I was a child, I often said things like ‘The floor was made of cement’. My father used to sigh at such statements, and
Conjunctive adverbs are one of the new categories of adverbs created by modern grammarians. Most of these words fit into the traditional grammar categories of adverbs of reason or degree. The recognition of conjunctive adverbs is the main reason I disagree with modern grammar! In modern grammar, conjunctive adverbs, sometimes called sentence connectors by other
Adverbs have always been my favourite part of speech. I think this is partly because, when I first learnt about them in primary school, there was a beautiful simplicity to them – or at least there was in my view. As the name suggests, adverbs add to a verb. The primary school definition is that
English spelling is tricky: that is something most people agree on. There are a couple of pairs of words that a particularly troublesome for a lot of people: practice and practise, and licence and license. Prophecy and prophesy follow the same rules, but as prophesy in particular isn’t commonly used (prophesise seems to have taken
We know that there are proper nouns, and we know that we use capital letters for proper nouns. But there is another group of words in English that we capitalise, and they are called proper adjectives. Never heard of them? Don’t worry: most people haven’t. Proper adjectives are like the long-lost cousin of proper nouns,
The English language is constantly changing. New words are created and old words fall into disuse. Australians start to speak and write differently from Canadians; New Zealanders use the language differently from Singaporeans. And to cope with these changes, grammar rules themselves change. For speakers of some other languages, the fact that the ‘rules’ of
I have looked at this question in my blog on Possessive apostrophes: when do you need them? but it is worth looking at in more detail, as it is one of the trickier areas of grammar. It is also one where the answer is sometimes not clear, but can either be illogical or even open
Adjectives and nouns: a close relationship In my first blog on the parts of speech, I wrote that the same word can often be used as different parts of speech, and we have already looked at how some words can be both nouns and verbs. But it is probably adjectives that are the part of