As we move into Act II of our language-making show, let’s pick up one of the loose threads from last week’s Babel Text: adverbs. When I say “adverb”, though, I’m not just talking about words like English “hardly” and “badly”, but any word or phrase that changes and refines the meaning of a verb. That includes certain phrases that we can call adverbial or subordinate clauses. We’ll see what those are in just a minute, but we should first back up and think about the very idea of an adverb.
The forgotten one
Adverbs, broadly speaking, are to verbs what adjectives are to nouns. They modify the meaning, allowing us to express finer distinctions. Verbs, remember, represent actions, so adverbs are what we use to tell how an action happens. Examples like “she sings happily” or “the clouds are hanging menacingly” show the most familiar of these adverbs.
Of course, there’s always more to the story. Not all adverbs really modify verbs. Some in English, for instance, modify whole sentences. Grammar pedants don’t like it, but that’s what has happened with words such as “hopefully”. And English also has words like “manly” that look like adverbs but fill the role of an adjective.
And then there are languages that don’t actually have a separate collection of adverbs at all. Many of these have no problem allowing an adjective to modify either a noun or a verb; in the latter case, it functions like an adverb, even though there’s no indication that it is one.
(If that weren’t enough, there is another way of defining adverbs: as grammatical words that don’t fit into any other category. That’s a negative definition that isn’t exactly helpful to those making their own languages, but it’s useful to know. Some languages do see adverbs this way, as a closed class of words separate from the other parts of speech, with the more common “adverbs” being derived regularly from adjectives.)
Really making
The largest group of adverbs (or what would be called adverbs) in most languages includes those derived from adjectives and meaning something like “in an X way” or simply “like X”. In English, we can make most of these with the -ly suffix: “real” becomes “really”, etc. Plenty of other languages have their own counterparts that are very similar in use, including Spanish -mente and Japanese -ku, to name only two.
Another common option is, well, nothing at all. Adjectives in many languages can be used directly as adverbs. In these cases, they might not be inflected as usual for case or number (since they won’t be modifying a noun), and they likely won’t appear in their customary position. But those would be the only ways you could tell the difference.
Every other word derivation is possible, too. You can have suffixes, prefixes, extra words before or after, and just about anything else you can think of. For widely-used adverbs, irregularities might arise, especially if the adjective itself already has them. English good is one example, forming the adverb well, to the consternation of schoolchildren everywhere. (The regular goodly also exists, but it has a much different connotation.)
Finally, adverbs aren’t necessarily always derived from adjectives. Words like “soon”, for example, are only adverbial. (It’s not a coincidence that most of the ones you can think of have something to do with time.) It’s perfectly possible to make an adverb from a noun or even a verb, as well. But these probably aren’t going to be made into a simple word; we need a phrase.
As an adverb
When one word just won’t do, adverbial phrases come to the rescue. What are they? Well, it’s right there in the name. An adverbial phrase is nothing more than a phrase that acts like an adverb. (Coincidentally enough, that last sentence perfectly illustrates my point: “like an adverb” is, in fact, an adverbial phrase!)
In English, many adverbial phrases are essentially prepositional phrases used as adverbs. They’re more likely to use “temporal” prepositions like before or when, since those don’t make as much sense for nouns, but anything is possible.
Grammatically speaking, the same is true. If a language allows them, adverbial phrases tend to take the same form as prepositional (or postpositional or whatever) phrases. It’s easy to see why, as the adverbial function only generalizes the idea of prepositions.
Because the clause
The adverbial clause, on the other hand, is a totally different animal. Here, we’re not talking about a little noun phrase, but a whole clause. It could be an entire sentence (an independent clause) or only a fragment unable to stand alone (a subordinate clause). Either way, it also works as an adverb, so it’s a good idea to look at it here.
The key difference between adverbial phrases and clauses is that a clause has a predicate. It’s usually a verb, but some languages only require something with a verbal meaning. (A language with a zero-copula construction, for example, could conceivably have a subordinate clause with only a subject and an object.)
Some of these verbs will be inflected like any other verb in the language. Take, for instance, this English sentence: “It started raining while I was walking home.” The marked part is the adverbial clause, and you can see that, except for the conjunction while, the clause could stand on its own as a sentence.
Now, on the other hand, let’s instead say, “I saw the rain while walking home.” This time, we still have a predicate (walking home), but it can’t stand alone. The special form of the verb, walking instead of walk, is our cue for this.
In English grammar, we call the first example an independent clause, while the second is a dependent one. Some linguists instead refer to them as balanced and deranked clauses, respectively. Either way, the difference between them is clear: one can be “broken out” into its own sentence, while the other can’t.
Counting the ways
Adverbial clauses come in a few different categories. Each has a different meaning and a different set of conjunctions that connect it to the rest of the sentence.
Here are the primary types of clauses, each with a brief definition and an example sentence. We’ll use them later. In the examples, the conjunction that introduces the adverbial clause is emphasized, and the clause itself is everything that follows.
-
Purpose: the purpose of an action; “I went home so that I could take a shower”
-
Time: when something happens, relative to some other time or event; “the boys played in the sand when they went to the beach”
-
Reason: the reason why something happens; “I can’t come because I am sick”
-
Place: the position or location of an action or event; “they like it where they live”
-
Manner: the way something is done; “this book wasn’t written how I would have liked it”
-
Condition: a possibility or consequence, an “if-then” situation; “bad things will happen if you go out in the storm”
There are a couple of others, but they work about the same. Clauses indicating results are similar to those of reason, and concessions are pretty close to conditions. Comparisons are worthy of their own topic, which will come a bit later.
Any of these clauses, though, can be used as adverbs. In English, as you can see above, they often follow the verb, like an object; this isn’t absolutely necessary, and any one of them can be rearranged to put the adverbial clause at the front.
Note, too, that they’re all independent. Taking that away isn’t quite as easy, and it doesn’t always work. It does in some cases, though, as long as the subject of both clauses is the same. We could say, for example, “I went home to take a shower“, creating a dependent clause. Mostly, English prefers “balanced” clauses, to use WALS terminology, permitting “deranked” as an occasional option. (In terms of style, dependent clauses sound slightly more formal or less “personal”, at least to me.)
Constructing the clause
While the general definition of an adverbial clause isn’t that dependent on a specific language, how they’re formed is. For English, as you can see, you first need a conjunction. Then, you have the clause itself. For dependent (or deranked, if you prefer) clauses, the verb appears as either an infinitive or a gerund, depending on what you’re trying to say; either way, it’s not the usual inflected form that you’d use in a “proper” sentence. Independent (balanced, hence the name) clauses have fully inflected verbs, although that isn’t saying much in English.
But how do you do it in a conlang? Well, that truly depends. They’re probably going to look a lot like prepositional phrases, however you do those. Verb-final languages will likely end an adverbial clause with the conjunction, and the clauses themselves will tend to be farther forward in the sentence. SVO or VSO languages would go the other way, more like English.
But this kind of phrase isn’t a core part of a sentence, so there’s nothing to stop it from “floating”. Adverbial clauses can show up anywhere. English allows them at the front, in the back, and even in the middle. Of course, you can be strict, too, if you like. You aren’t going to see many adverbs at the end of a Japanese sentence, after all.
Next up
Next week, we’ll look at how Isian and Ardari tame these monstrous clauses. Then, it’s time to answer something you’ve probably asked once or twice: how do we ask a question?