Adverbials For Time
Adverbials for time are words or phrases that provide information about when an action takes place. They can indicate specific points in time, such as "yesterday" or "next week," or they can express duration, frequency, or the order of events. Adverbials for time help to situate actions within a temporal framework and are an important aspect of language and communication.
5 Key excerpts on "Adverbials For Time"
eBook - ePub- Wolfgang Klein(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...8 Temporal adverbials and their meaning It is now four o’clock, as every day at about this time. (Anonymous radio speaker) 8.1 Introduction The grammatical categories of tense marking and aspect marking are not the only possibilities to express temporality, and some languages do not use this option at all. There are at least three other formal devices, which are closely interrelated and often hard to separate: 1 Temporal adverbials (henceforth: TADVs), like yesterday, after the autopsy, when I first saw her curly hair, etc. 2 Temporal particles, like Chinese le, Tok Pisin bai, or Hawaii Creole English bin. 3 Compound expressions (other than by adverbials), in particular compound verbs, like to run on, to continue to run, to finish crying, etc. Compound expressions can be the result of word formation processes, as is the case for Aktionsarten in the original sense of this term (see section 2.3); in German, for example, ample use is made of this possibility. They can also be the result of various types of syntactic composition. In this chapter, we shall not systematically deal with compound expressions of either type. (A good recent discussion, with the focus on history, can be found in Brinton 1988.) Similarly, we shall not discuss temporal particles here, which are somehow between temporal adverbials and inflectional categories and occur only in a limited number of languages. (For a discussion of temporal particles in Chinese, see Li Ping 1989, Smith 1992: chapter 11 ; in Pidgins, see Labov 1970 and Romaine 1988: section 8.3.) In the present chapter, we shall only be concerned with the contribution of temporal adverbials to the expression of temporality. The significance of this contribution should be obvious; there are languages which lack grammatical categories to express time but there is no language without temporal adverbials. Another restriction is to be made here...
eBook - ePub- Yip Po-Ching, Don Rimmington(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 9 Adverbials Adverbials are words or expressions that modify verbs in the same way that attributives qualify nouns, and they are therefore placed immediately before the verb they modify. They may be divided into two categories: restrictive and descriptive. Restrictive adverbials function to restrict the time frame, location, tone, structural orientation or referential scope of verbs. They consist of (a) time expressions; (b) a closed set of monosyllabic adverbs that refer forwards and backwards to particular words or expressions in a sentence or context to highlight or emphasise them; (c) set expressions used as mood or tone-setters of an utterance (e.g. 老实说 lǎoshí shuō ‘to be honest’); (d) negators; and (e) coverbal expressions of all kinds. 1 Descriptive adverbials, on the other hand, describe the manner in which the action encoded in the verb is being carried out. They are usually, but not always, followed by the marker 地 de ‘in the manner of’. Restrictive adverbials, apart from coverbal expressions, generally come before descriptive ones. If there is a coverbal expression in the sentence, a descriptive adverbial can be placed either before or after it depending on meaning and emphasis...
eBook - ePubDialects of English
Studies in Grammatical Variation
- Peter Trudgill, J. K. Chambers(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Part five Adverbials Chapter 19 Adverbials in English dialects J. K. Chambers and Peter Trudgill Most of the chapters in this book have been centrally concerned with dialectal variation in the verb system. In turning now to adverbials, we are not, in fact, leaving the verb system entirely. Although adverbials fill several semantic and syntactic roles in English, most of them involve modification of the verb, and the relation to the verb system is close. One of their best-known roles is to further specify the type of action expressed by the verb, as in In many languages, such specifications might be realized by affixes on the verb itself, expressing habitual, iterative and inchoative aspects. Another role is to signal the speaker's attitude towards the propositional content of the sentence, as in This function is very similar to that of the modal auxiliaries of the verbal system; the meanings indicated by the adverbs can be paraphrased with modals: The similarity between some adverbs and the modals becomes clear in Brown's discussion of double modals in Chapter 8. Speakers whose grammar does not include double modals are usually puzzled, even mystified, when they first hear such sentences as He might could do it. He should can do it. Their puzzlement usually disappears when they realize that these sentences can be paraphrased in the standard grammar by substituting an adverb for one of the modals. He could maybe do it./He could perhaps do it. He can likely do it./He can probably do it. Because they have so many diverse functions in English grammar, adverbials form the most heterogeneous category among the major lexical classes. They are usually dealt with by grammarians in subclasses determined by semantic and/or syntactic criteria, as manner adverbs, temporals, locatives, intensifiers and so on. (For a useful syntactic classification, see Jackendoff 1972: Ch. 3; for a comprehensive outline, see Quirk et al. 1985: Ch...
eBook - ePubBasic Russian
A Grammar and Workbook
- John Murray, Sarah Smyth(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Unit 14 When we do things DOI: 10.4324/9780203559017-14 Adverbials of time Adverbials of time are words and phrases which express when (когда) something happens or happened. In this unit we look at two types of adverbials of time: those expressing how often something happened (frequency) and those expressing the point in time at which something happened. Frequency The ways of expressing the notion of frequency in Russian include using an adverb (часто, редко ‘often, rarely’), an adverbial phrase (каждый день, каждый вечер ‘every day, every evening’; раз в неделю ‘once a week’) or a negative adverb (никогда (не) ‘never’). The question to elicit ‘how often’ someone does something or something happens is как часто? Points in time To express when something happened, the following adverbs can be used: single indeclinable words: сейчас ‘now’, сегодня ‘today’, завтра ‘tomorrow’ single words in the instrumental case: утром ‘in the morning’, днём ‘in the day’, вечером ‘in the evening’, ночью ‘at night’ весной ‘in spring’, летом ‘in summer’, осенью ‘in autumn’, зимой ‘in winter’ combinations of (a) and (b): сегодня утром ‘this morning’ завтра вечером ‘tomorrow evening’ prepositional phrases where the noun phrase is in the case indicated after each preposition below: в + accusative во сколько? в шесть часов ‘at what time? at six o'clock’; в какой день? в этот день; в субботу ‘on what day? on that day; on Saturday’ до + genitive до войны ‘before the war’ после +. genitive после обеда ‘after lunch’ во время + genitive во время урока ‘during the lesson’ с + genitive … до + genitive с понедельника до пятницы ‘from Monday to Friday’ по + dative plural по вечерам, по понедельникам ‘in the evenings, on Mondays’ Days of the week In Russian the days of the week are written with a small initial letter: понедельник, вторник, среда, четверг, пятница, суббота, воскресенье...
eBook - ePub- Edward Dr. Woods, Rudy Coppieters(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...232) Task two ** (a) Arrange the above adverbials in groups on the basis of form categories, while adding FP, MP or EP in brackets to designate their position in the sentence. (b) How does length affect these positions? Task three ** Insert the adverbials (presented in alphabetical order) in the most appropriate position. Only the underlined sentences should be considered. 1. General elections take place. (always; on a Thursday) They are not public holidays. People have to work, polling stations are open. (from seven in the morning; in the normal way; so; till ten at night; to give everybody the opportunity to vote) (from James O’Driscoll, Britain, p. 101) 2. Andrew Nugée would pack an SLR film camera and about 30 rolls of film. (not long ago; when he went on vacation) He takes a digital camcorder. (for capturing both moving and still images; now; simply) Nugée is just one of many who have been bitten by the digitalimaging bug: “It’s changed my approach to photography. I take my camcorder,” he says. (completely; everywhere) (from Newsweek, 3 September 2001, p.16) 7.3. Time-when 1 Sections 151–155; 455–456 Time-when is often expressed by adverbials having end-position. The commonest type of adverbial is the prepositional phrase, used especially to refer to points and periods of time: • at 6.30 p.m.; at noon (= clock-time) • on Sunday; (on) the next day (= day periods) • in / during the morning; in / during April (= shorter or longer than day periods) • between 1990 and 2000 (= periods with clearly defined limits) • by night; by day (= idioms). Noun phrases and adverbs are used in adverbials such as: • last Saturday; this year; yesterday; tomorrow. Task one * Add time-when adverbials to the sentences below, giving them end-position and using the most appropriate connecting preposition where necessary. 1. Western society changed profoundly. (the 1960s) 2. British-born actor Sir Alec Guinness died...
