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Adventures with Adverbials: Part
One |
From VOA Learning English, this is Everyday Grammar.
The 1954 American film On the Waterfront helped make
actor Marlon Brando a star.
Brando played the main character, a dockworker named
Terry Malloy. In the film, Malloy meets face-to-face
with a gangster at a seaport. The two men fight in front
of many dockworkers. The fight is terrible, and it lasts
a long time.
You may not realize it, but describing this fight scene
can teach you a lot about the structure of the English
language.
In fact, telling about this fight scene can show you how
to use adverbial prepositional phrases. Do not be
frightened. This report will be much less painful than
the hard punches thrown by Marlon Brando's character!
What are adverbials?
Adverbials are words or terms that give information
about time, place, reason or the way something is done.
They answer questions like How often? Where? Why? When?
They are traditionally defined as modifiers of verbs.
Adverbials take several shapes – adverbs,* verb phrases,
and subordinate clauses, for example.
Today, we begin our report on adverbials with one of the
most common adverbial structures: the prepositional
phrase.**
Adverbials
Adverbials are important because they can change or
amend almost any of the basic sentence patterns in
English. In other Everyday Grammar stories, we explored
five common sentence patterns that form the basic
structure of many sentences in English.
You can read about these patterns on our website.
Adverbials are one of the reasons that sentences are
longer than the basic sentence structures. Adverbials
add more information to a sentence.
One of the most useful ways to include more information
is to add a prepositional phrase.
The Prepositional Phrase
A prepositional phrase is a group of words that begins
with a preposition and ends in a noun, pronoun, or noun
phrase. Prepositional phrases generally have two parts:
the preposition and the object of the preposition.
Learning and understanding prepositions is important. Of
the 20 most commonly used words in English, eight are
prepositions.
The object of the preposition is often a noun phrase – a
group of words that acts like a noun in a sentence.
Do not worry - all of this sounds much more complex than
it actually is!
Think back to the movie from the beginning of the story,
On the Waterfront.
On is a preposition. The Waterfront is the object of the
preposition.
The name of the film, On the Waterfront, is an example
of a prepositional phrase.
Putting together prepositional
phrases
English often puts together groups of prepositional
phrases to make sentences longer.
Now consider this sentence that tells about the fight
scene in On the Waterfront:
Terry Malloy fought.
Do you remember how we told you that adverbials give
information about place, time, or reason? If you wanted
to describe the fight scene from the movie, you could
add a prepositional phrase to tell where Terry Malloy
fought.
Terry Malloy fought (where?) on the Waterfront.
You can add a second prepositional phrase to tell about
how long he fought.
Terry Malloy fought (where?) on the Waterfront (how
long?) for three hours.
Then, you could add another prepositional phrase if you
wanted to tell about when he fought.
Terry Malloy fought (where?) on the Waterfront (how
long?) for three hours (when?) on Saturday.
Now, you do not want to include too many prepositional
phrases in a sentence. That might confuse, or lose, your
reader.
However, you can still see that you can build a long
sentence from a simple starting point such as "Terry
Malloy fought".
You can move adverbial
prepositional phrases
Adverbial prepositional phrases are fun because you can
move them to different places in the sentence. Moving
adverbial phrases lets you emphasize or highlight
different words in the sentence.
There is one general rule you should remember: You can
move time phrases easier than other kinds of
prepositional phrases.
This idea is not as complex as you might think.
Consider our example:
Terry Malloy fought on the Waterfront for three hours on
Saturday.
You can move the phrases to say this:
For three hours on Saturday Terry Malloy fought on the
Waterfront.
You see that the phrases have moved, but the sentence
has all of the same words -- and it still has the same
meaning!
Or you could say this:
On Saturday Terry Malloy fought on the Waterfront for
three hours.
In these two examples, the phrases that tell about time
are in the front of the sentence.
English speakers usually do not put the ‘location’ or
‘place’ adverbial phrase at the beginning of the
sentence. You might read a sentence like this, but it is
not as common: On the Waterfront Terry Malloy fought
for three hours on Saturday.
This sentence could be used in poetry or writing.
However, it has a more artistic feel to it. In general,
English speakers do not speak this way.
So, what are the advantages of
adverbials?
Recognizing and understanding adverbials will help you
with your speaking and writing. You can use adverbials
to play up certain words in the sentence – a common
strategy in political speeches, for example.
Adverbial prepositional phrases can be difficult, but
learning how to recognize and use them will help improve
your writing and speaking skills. They will also help
you on your next English test, too!
I’m Jill Robbins.
I'm John Russell.
And I'm Alice Bryant.
John Russell wrote this story for Learning English.
George Grow was the editor.
We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments
Section.
*There are several types of adverbials. One common type
is the adverb. Adverbs modify verbs; the easiest to
recognize are the –ly adverbs, such as suddenly,
quietly, or nervously.
**Prepositional phrases can modify verbs or nouns. When
they are acting as adverbials, they are modifying a
verb.
You can read more about these types of adverbs here:
https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/beating-problems-with-adverbs-everyday-grammar/2843494.html |
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