What is an adverb

Introduction to adverbs. Practice: Meet the adverb. Practice: Using adverbs and adjectives. Practice: Identifying relative adverbs.

Next lesson. Current timeTotal duration Google Classroom Facebook Twitter. Video transcript - [Voiceover] Hello grammarians. Today we are going to talk, skillfully and patiently, about adverbs. And what it is that adverbs do. And in order to do that, I think it might be useful to talk about what adjectives do first.

So adjectives can modify stuff. And I should have been clearer in the last video, and said that the stuff they modify is nouns. But, I didn't wanna introduce too many rules and strictures.

What adjectives modify is nouns, and only nouns. Adverbs modify everything else. So adverbs modify everything that's not a noun. And the way we usually see this applied, is with verbs, and it's right there in the name too. And this comes from the Latin meaning on or to verbs, action words.

Adverbs are words that you slap on to verbs, basically. The woman is quite pretty. You can use an adverb to describe another adverb. In fact, if you wanted to, you could use several. Phillip sings rather enormously too loudly. The problem is that it often produces weak and clunky sentences like the one above, so be careful not to overdo it.

Some adverbs can modify entire sentences—unsurprisingly, these are called sentence adverbs. Common ones include generally, fortunately, interestingly, and accordingly. Fortunately, we got there in time. Interestingly, no one at the auction seemed interested in bidding on the antique spoon collection. At one time, the use of the word hopefully as a sentence adverb e. People continued to use it though, and many style guides and dictionaries now accept it.

An absolute adverb describes something in its own right: He smiled warmly. To make the comparative form of an adverb that ends in -ly, add the word more : He smiled more warmly than the others. To make the superlative form of an adverb that ends in -ly, add the word most : He smiled most warmly of them all. Place adverbs as close as possible to the words they are supposed to modify.

Putting the adverb in the wrong spot can produce an awkward sentence at best and completely change the meaning at worst. Be especially careful about the word only , which is one of the most often misplaced modifiers. Consider the difference between these two sentences:. The first sentence means that all Phillip did was feed the cat.

When an adverb is modifying a verb phrase, the most natural place for the adverb is usually the middle of the phrase. We are quickly approaching the deadline. Adverbs can also be used as intensifiers to modify adjectives. When adverbs modify other adverbs, they create an adverbial phrase. Now that you know what an adverb is, you're closer to using adverbs to strengthen your writing. But how do you identify these parts of speech in a sentence?

When you look at a list of adverbs, you'll see that many of them end in - ly , including most adverbs that modify verbs. But other adverbs don't follow this same rule. The best way to identify an adverb in a sentence is to determine its function in the sentence.

There are five main kinds of adverbs , each answering a different question. They include:. Another type of adverb is conjunctive adverbs , such as "also," "besides," "meanwhile," and "likewise. An adverb is often one of the more descriptive words in a sentence. Once you find the adverb, you can determine what question the adverb is answering. For example:. Notice that you can remove all of these adverbs without affecting the meaning of the sentences.

For example, "The dog ate his dinner" still makes sense. However, adding the adverb "messily" to make "The dog messily ate his dinner" provides the reader with a more vivid picture. You'll find adverbs in three different places in a sentence or clause, depending on which type of adverb they are.

Adverb positions include:. Most adverbs are in the end position of a phrase, clause or sentence, as they follow the words that they modify. Sentence adverbs, conjunctive adverbs and time adverbs often appear in the initial position, while adverbs meant to focus on an action appear in the middle of the sentence. Since adverbs and adjectives both modify other words, people often mistakenly use an adjective when they should use an adverb and vice versa. The first sentence is incorrect because "bad" is an adjective being used to describe "behaved," which is a verb.

Changing "bad" to the adverb "badly" correctly describes the verb. However, this is not always the case:. Linking verbs such as "feel" are followed by adjectives, not adverbs. That's because linking verbs aren't technically showing the action of the sentence; they're simply linking the subject of the sentence "I" to the subject complement "bad".

Another common adverb vs. Once you get the hang of these differences, you'll rarely make these types of errors.