The Adverb in English

o a class of notional words [Smirnitsky, Barkhudarov, Ilish]

o General semantics: give a characteristic of another characteristic

o They cover a wide range of semantic categories. Their major semantic groups are:

Circumstantial Adverbs denote the circumstances of an action named by a Verb →   Adverbs of Place, Time, etc.	Qualitative Adverbs ↓ ↓
modify a quality named by an Adj or Adv →   Adverbs of Degree (Intensifiers and Downtoners)	qualify an action named by a Verb →   Adverbs of Manner

o Morphological categories:

- form only the category of Degrees of Comparison which is only partially realised by a limited group of Qualitative Adverbs. It is formed:

1. synthetically:

(1a) suppletive forms

(1b) forms homonymous with the cognate adjective forms ( + - er, -est)

2. syntactically (more, most)

o Syntactic functions:

- the Adverbial / Adjunct to a Verb

- the Adverbial Modifier to an Adj / Adv

- sometimes the Attribute to a Noun which can stand either in postposition or in preposition to it

o a very heterogeneous class whose field overlaps with fields of other lexical-grammatical classes - Prepositions and Conjunctions. Some of them are homonymous though they perform different syntactic functions