Since adjectives have nouns covered, adverbs modify pretty much anything else. Theyāll modify verbs, theyāll modify adjectives, theyāll modify prepositions, theyāll modify determinatives, theyāll even modify other adverbs. They can usually take āmoreā and āmost,ā like adjectives, though they donāt roll with the ā-erā and ā-estā endings. And handily enough, they mostly look like adjectives with an ā-lyā hanging on, so theyāre easy to spot. āHappyā is an adjective; āhappilyā is an adverb. Ditto ācantankerousā and ācantankerously.ā Was there ever a chiller, more easy-going category of words? And yet this category, I tell you, this very category has been most maligned by school-grammar writers, who try to call whole piles of words āadverbsā because theyāre not sure what to do with them. Like ābefore.ā Why would ābeforeā be an adverb? It doesnāt modify a damn thing. Yet they look at a sentence like āI saw her beforeā and say ābeforeā is modifyingā¦ what? āSawā? No. This ends now. āBeforeā is a preposition. Even if thereās nothing after it. Thatās right: prepositions do not need to be followed by a noun. Many are, sure. The most common prepositions show how two nouns are connected in space or time, like āI saw Claudia in the movie theaterā or āI saw Claudia before lunch.ā But prepositions can also be followed by a clause: āI saw her before I gilded my oysters.ā They can be followed by another preposition: āI saw her ahead of me.ā And they can be followed by nothing at all: āI saw her downstairs.ā This is not a new idea, as Huddleston & Pullum point out. Linguists have been working with this since Otto Jespersen first came out with his revamp in 1924. But somehow it has not managed to trickle into schools, where weāre taught that ābeforeā is sometimes a preposition, sometimes an adverb, and sometimes a so-called subordinating conjunction, even though all three times it has exactly the same meaning and works exactly the same way in the sentence. Earlier, when I talked about verbs, I mentioned that ālikeā can be followed by an object or a clause, and āeatā can be followed by an object or by nothing. Did you shriek in rage and say that they couldnāt both be verbs, one had to be an adjective or some such bosh? No! You nodded along! Or more likely just skimmed right past it! So we are not going to sit here now and say that ābeforeā fails at prepositioning because it can be followed by a couple different things.
In honour of US National Grammar Day, hereāsĀ a quote from The League of Nerds about the much-maligned difference between adverbs and prepositions.Ā (via allthingslinguistic)
