ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a set of lexical items usually referred to as adverbs. We will take the view that the term adverb does not denote a set of entities with a particular categorial status, as do the terms verb, noun, adjective, and preposition; rather, it denotes a set of lexical items that perform a particular syntactic function in the clause, more specifically that of an adverbial phrase. Our use of the term adverb should therefore be seen as shorthand for “adverbially used adjective”. For many adverbs, their adjectival status is easy to establish, since they can also be used attributively or predicatively in other contexts, or exhibit typical syntactic or morphological properties such as those listed in (1).
