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Grammar
Course: Grammar > Unit 4
Lesson 2: Introduction to adverbsIntroduction to adverbs
Adverbs are a kind of word, similar to adjectives, that you use to modify other words. Adverbs change verbs or adjectives, like "very" or "carefully". Many adverbs can be formed by adding "-ly" to an adjective: add "-ly" to change "careful" to "carefully".
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- You teach me a lot in your videos. If it wasn't for you I wouldn't have passed my test!(72 votes)
- It's true, I wasn't really SURE what a adverb was, then you cleared it up for me.Thanks, sir!!(30 votes)
- excuse me Mr. D Dawg, you can make literally every adj an adverb just by adding LY?(25 votes)
- No, not every time :)
For example, colors are adjectives, but you can't make them into adverbs by adding "-ly" to the end.
- green (adj) = ✔
- greenly (adv?) = 🚫
- orange (adj) = ✔
- orangely (adv?) = 🚫
Here are some more examples:
- big (adj) = ✔
- bigly (adv?) = 🚫
- small (adj) = ✔
- small-ly (adv?) = 🚫
- old (adj) = ✔
- oldly (adv?) = 🚫
- young (adj) = ✔
- youngly (adv?) = 🚫
- early (adj) = ✔
- early-ly (adv?) = 🚫
So, even though you can often form a real adverb by adding -ly to an adjective, it doesn't work all of the time.
Hope this helps!(55 votes)
- You talked about how you have a adjective which describes the verb, can an adjective describe the word but be a description as well, like the man leisurely walked, and would the word leisurely be the adjective?(15 votes)
- When you say "the man walked leisurely" the verb is "walked" and the word describing this verb is "leisurely"
A word that describes a verb is an adverb, so "leisurely" is an adverb.
Remember:
- adjectives describe nouns
- adverbs describe verbs
Hope this helps!(20 votes)
- Wow! This is great! This has cleared out everything for me. Except for one thing, do adverbs always end in "ly"? Please answer this question for me! :)(11 votes)
- No, adverbs do not always end in "ly"!
Adverbs very often end in "ly", but I would never say that adverbs always end in "ly". Although it sometimes seems that every adverb ends in "ly", one should seldom make assumptions about such things.
Featured adverbs, in order of appearance:
- very
- often
- never
- always
- sometimes
- seldom
Great question - hope this helps!(13 votes)
- Do all abverbs have the LY on the end?(8 votes)
- No Not All of them Here are the Adverbs which don't have LY as an Ending : Never, Often, Very, these are just a few to get you started Heres a website that can help you : https://www.thefreedictionary.com/A-very-long-list-of-adverbs,-not-all-of-which-end-in--ly.htm(4 votes)
- Why you don not put the questions of "how to identify and adverb and adjective"? Is unnecessary?(9 votes)
- Yes almost all for example: David hard to teach us. David Is working hardly to teach us. David hardly works to teach us. Two ways to say it(7 votes)
- when you say everything else what do you mean ?(7 votes)
- Let's apply some set theory to this.
If the set is "things in my tool box", then "everything else" means all the things that are NOT in my tool box.
If the set is "diseases", then "everything else" means "all conditions that are not diseases".
In short, "everything else" is a very ambiguous term.(7 votes)
- Can somebody please describe a verb and an adverb(6 votes)
- Hi, ar0355848,
A verb is any word that means an action, for example, walk, walking, will walk, and walked. An adverb acts as an adjective for verbs, for example walked slowly, walks quickly. etc.
Hope this helps,
-Logical(3 votes)
- What are the types of adverbs and in which situations do you put the adverbs?(7 votes)
- David pointed out in the previous video that adjectives belong to a class of words called the modifiers. It got me wondering, what are the other class of words that we have in English?(7 votes)
- There are four major word classes in English: Nouns, Verbs, Adverbs, and Adjectives which are described by the Cambridge dictionary. The other word classes include prepositions, pronouns, determiners, conjunctions and interjections. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/word-classes-and-phrase-classes(1 vote)
Video transcript
- [Voiceover] Hello grammarians. Today we are going to talk, skillfully and patiently, about adverbs. And what it is that adverbs do. And in order to do that,
I think it might be useful to talk about
what adjectives do first. So adjectives can modify stuff. And I should have been clearer in the last video, and said that the stuff
they modify is nouns. But, I didn't wanna
introduce too many rules and strictures. What adjectives modify is nouns, and only nouns. Adverbs modify everything else. So adverbs modify everything that's not a noun. And the way we usually see
this applied, is with verbs, and it's right there in the name too. Ad-Verbs. And this comes from the Latin meaning on or to verbs, action words. Adverbs are words that
you slap on to verbs, basically. What I imagine when I think of adverbs, is I kind of see like a sticker. Here's the sticker we've got we can say "slowly". So we can take this thing and turn it into a sticker. Move it around, do what we like. So, we can write a sentence like Greyson ran slowly. And slowly here, refers back to ran. It's how he ran. It's not really describing Greyson. It's modifying or describing the action of running. Pearl arranged the furniture slowly. Little sticker that we
just, poof, put on there. But a word is also considered an adverb, if it modifies an adjective. So let's say adverbs modify verbs and adjectives. So we could say something like, "Vanessa was very hungry". Right, because hungry is an adjective, and very, is doing this thing, where it's modifying hungry. It's not Vanessa wasn't very. You can't be very; very
is not an adjective. But it is a modifier, and
the word that it's modifying, is hungry. How hungry was Vanessa? Vanessa was very hungry. Vanessa could also be, slightly hungry. And this leads me to one of the most important things about adverbs. Which is that generally, they tend to have ly on them. So generally the way to make an adverb, is to just take an adjective, and add ly to it. So you take the word slow, you add ly you get the adverb slowly. You take the word nice, you add ly, you get the adverb nicely. If you take the adjective cheerful, add an ly, you get the adverb cheerfully. So adverbs modify everything
that isn't a noun. And that means that they modify verbs, and adjectives. The way you make an
adverb most of the time, is by taking an adjective
and tacking on ly to the end of it. It's like a sticker, that you, poof, put on top of a verb or an adjective. That's what adverbs are,
and that's what they do. And what you can do, is learn anything. David out.