Essay On Adverbials

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2. Literature Review As the adverbial is the most flexible part in the sentence compared with the other sentence elements, researchers have their own different opinions about it and there have been many studies on it both at home and abroad. In this chapter, we’ll make a brief survey of the adverbial studies in Chinese and English. First we’ll give the classifications of adverbials, and then we’ll focus on the current situation of studying of the adverbial positions, and finally summarize the studies of sentence-initial and sentence-final adverbials both at home and abroad. 2.1 Adverbs and Adverbials Adverb and adverbial are greatly connected with each other. In this section, we are primarily concentrated on the definition of them and classification of adverbials. 2.1.1 Definition Quirk et al said:” because of its great heterogeneity, the adverb class is the most nebulous and puzzling of the traditional word classes. Indeed, it is tempting …show more content…

2.1.2 Classification of adverbials On the basis of different classifying standards, there are different opinions about classifications of adverbials both in English and in Chinese. As we all known, adverbs occupy a very diverse and large part of speech category in traditional English grammar, which includes modifiers of verbs, adjectives clauses, other adverbs and whole sentences. The term adverbial further extends this class of modifiers to include prepositional phrases, noun phrases and clauses. Jackendoff (1972) classifies adverbs into the verb phrase adverbs, the subject-oriented adverbs, and the speaker-oriented adverbs. Bellert (1977) points out five distinct groups within Jackendoff’s speaker-oriented adverbs: the evaluative adverbs, the modal adverbs, the domain adverbs, the conjunctive adverbs, and the pragmatic

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