Adverbs

Revision as of 12:12, 21 February 2010

In the UNL framework, adverbs are classified in four different categories: specifiers, adjuncts, conjuncts and disjuncts.

• Specifier adverbs (such as “not”, “more”, “less”, “very”, “rather”, etc) are adverbs that do not really introduce new information, but only specify the information conveyed by a verb, an adjective or another adverb. They do not constitute properly an open class category and many of them may even be replaced by other closed class categories, such as affixes (not happy = unhappy, write again = rewrite, more happy = happier). In UNL, specifier adverbs are represented by attributes of degree (@not, @more, @less, @very, @too, @rather, @a_bit, @almost, @again, etc);
• Adjunct adverbs (such as “slowly”, “always”, “frequently”, “here”, etc) are adverbs that qualify a verb, an adjective or another adverb by indicating manner, time, place and frequency. They answer questions such as "how", "when", "where" and "how often". They differ from specifier adverbs in the sense they introduce and can be associated to independent concepts and are not simply concept modifiers. In UNL, adjunct adverbs are always represented as UWs, as follows:
  • Adverbs of manner (how)
    • Adverbs of manner (such as cheerfully, fast, quickly, slowly, inadequately and healthy) are always represented as UWs and are linked to their modified by the relation man (manner);
  • Adverbs of time (when)
    • Adverbs of time (such as early, never, now, often, soon, then, today and tomorrow) are always represented as UWs and are linked to their modified by the relations tim (time), tmf (time from), tmt (time to) or fmt (from to);
  • Adverbs of place (where)
    • Adverbs of place (such as above, away, below, down, here, inside, there and up) are always represented as UWs and are linked to their modified by the relations plc (place), plf (place from), plt (place to) or via';
  • Adverbs of frequency (how often)
    • Adverbs of frequency (such as always, never, usually, frequently, sometimes, occasionally) are always represented as UWs and are linked to their modified by the relation tim (time);
  • Conjuncts (not to be confounded with conjunctions) are connecting adverbs that add information to the sentence that is not considered part of the propositional content (or at least not essential) but which connects the sentence with previous parts of the discourse, such as in the cases below:
    • He has no money. In addition, he has no means of getting any.
    • The French love music. In other words, music is appreciated in France.

Conjunct adverbs are to be represented as UWs linked to the whole sentence (to be treated as a hypernode) by the relation man (manner).

• Disjuncts (aka as adverbs of viewpoint or commenting adverbs) are a type of adverbial adjunct that expresses information that is not considered essential to the sentence it appears in, but which is considered to be the speaker's or writer's attitude towards, or descriptive statement of, the propositional content of the sentence:
  • Honestly, I didn't do it.
  • Fortunately, I have it right here.
  • In my opinion, the green one is better.

Disjunct adverbs are to be represented in UNL as follows:

• As attributes, if their meaning can be subsumed by any of the attributes of modality (such as @emphasis, @belief, @conviction, etc); or
• As UWs linked to the whole sentence (to be treated as a hypernode) by the relation man (manner).