| 词组 | flat adverbs |
| 释义 | flat adverbs A flat adverb is an adverb that has the same form as its related adjective: fast in "drive fast," slow in "go slow," sure in "you sure fooled me," bright in "the moon is shining bright," flat in "she turned me down flat," hard and right in "he hit the ball hard but right at the shortstop." Flat adverbs have been a problem for grammarians and schoolmasters for a couple of centuries now, and more recently usage writers have continued to wrestle with them. Flat adverbs were more abundant and used in greater variety formerly than they are now. They were used then as ordinary adverbs and as intensifiers: • ... commanding him incontinent to avoid out of his realm and to make no war —Lord Berners, translation of Froissart's Chronicles, 1523 • ... I was horrid angry, and would not go —Samuel Pepys, diary, 29 May 1667 • ... the weather was so violent hot —Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1719 • ... the five ladies were monstrous fine —Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, 6 Feb. 1712 • ... I will not be extreme bitter —William Wycherly, The Country Wife, 1675 You would be hard pressed to find modern examples of these particular uses. Originally such adverbs had not been identical with adjectives; they had been marked by case endings—usually a dative -e—but over the course of Middle English the ending disappeared. The 18th-century grammarians, such as Lowth 1762, Priestley 1798, and Murray 1795, could not explain how these words were adverbs. They saw them as adjectives, and they considered it a grammatical mistake to use an adjective for an adverb. Their preference was for the suffixal adverb ending in -ly. Two centuries of chipping away by schoolmasters and grammarians has reduced the number of flat adverbs in common use and has lowered the status of quite a few others. Many of them continue in standard use, but most of them compete with an -ly form. Bernstein 1971, for instance, lists such pairs as bad, badly; bright, brightly; close, closely; fair, fairly; hard, hardly; loud, loudly; right, rightly; sharp, sharply; tight, tightly. Many of these pairs have become differentiated, and now the flat adverb fits in some expressions while the -ly adverb goes in others. And a few flat adverbs—fast and soon, for instance—have managed to survive as the only choice (though in the latter case the adjective has all but disappeared). The controversy or uncertainty over the status of this or that flat adverb is a legacy of our not having had an adequate grammar. The Latin grammar that was all the 18th-century grammarians knew could not explain how the same word could be both an adjective and an adverb. Thus common usages such as the intensive exceeding were vexing to the grammarians: • ... was so exceeding harmless —John Dryden, "Defence of the Epilogue," 1672 • ... having an exceeding good memory —Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, 1784 • ... an exceeding good ball last night —Jane Austen, letter, 9 Jan. 1796 English has many words that can function both as adverb and adjective. If the early grammarians had realized that English was not the same as Latin, a whole lot of agonizing and rationalizing could have been avoided. And we might also have avoided those supernumerary adverbs like muchly and thusly—often criticized as hypercorrect—formed in accordance with the grammarians' predilection for -ly forms. Several articles in this book deal with the question of flat adverbs; see bad, badly; cheap 2; considerable 2; near, nearly; quick, quickly; scarcely 1; slow, slowly; tight, tightly. |
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