SECTION VI.

ADVERBS.

The power of this class of words, in the great business of marking, and the extent of the service rendered by them, will be so easily seen, that a few words will suffice to explain them. Adverbs may be reduced under five heads; 1, Adverbs of Time; 2, Adverbs of Place; 3, Adverbs of Quantity; 4, Adverbs of Quality; 5, Adverbs of Relation. They are mostly abridgments, capable of being substituted for longer marks. And they are always employed for the purpose of putting a modification upon the Subject, or the Predicate, of a Proposition. A few examples will suffice for the further elucidation of this subject. “Anciently,” is an adverb of time. It is of the same import as the expression, “In distant past time.” It is applied to modify the subject, or predicate, of a proposition, as in the following example: “A number of men anciently in England had wives in common.” “Had wives in common,” is the predicate of the above proposition, and it is modified, or limited, in respect to time, by the word “anciently.” Adverbs of place it is easy to exemplify in the same manner. Under adverbs of quantity all those which mark degrees may be included; as greatly, minutely: Thus, “He enlarged greatly upon patriotism:“ “Greatly” here means “in many words;” and it modifies the predicate, “enlarged,” &c. Adverbs of 200 quality and relation are exceedingly numerous, because they are easily made from the words which connote the quality or relation: thus, from hard, hardly; from loud, loudly; from sweet, sweetly; from warm, warmly: again, from father, paternally; from son, filially; from magistrate, magisterially; from high, highly; from expensive, expensively; and so on. In all this no difficulty is presented which requires removing.60

60 In many cases, and even in some of the examples given, the adverb does not modify either the subject or the predicate, but the application of the one to the other. “Anciently,” in the proposition cited, is intended to limit and qualify not men, nor community of wives, but the practice by men of community of wives: it is a circumstance affecting not the subject or the predicate, but the predication. The qualification of past and distant time attaches to the fact asserted, and to the copula, which is the mark of assertion. The reason of its seeming to attach to the predicate is because, as the author remarked in a previous section, the predicate, when a verb, includes the copula.—Ed.

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