Most (but not all) grammars include a concept of word class under one name or another. Such descriptions or analyses may be called 'grammars'. There are merely alternative or competing descriptions which appear over time as more independent analyses of the language are undertaken. Now there is no one, true description of any language (except perhaps constructed languages such as yours). (The others being noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, and interjection.) In this view of English grammar 'adverb' is the catch-all category where everything that doesn't fit into one of the other traditional categories ends up. How we use it in English, especially in dictionaries, goes back to the study of Latin and Greek. One problem is that the entire concept of ' part of speech' is very old. So my question (finally) is, are these words really adverbs, and if not, how can these words be classified? But, AFAICT, adverbs cannot modify other adverbs or non-participle adjectives, but very, extremely, really, and quite can. The filthily clothed man tried to hug me. Since adverbs can modify participles, which can be classified as adjectives, I did notice that dictionaries list these words as adverbs. Just for my purposes of labelling the words in my language, I just invented a term that I think fits their role in the sentence: meta-modifier.

adjectives and adverbs, as can be seen in the following example sentences.Īll of the extremely smart girls will very quietly figure out a quite clever solution. However, I noticed that these words do work when they modify modifiers, i.e. (Some of the words do have several meanings where they can be other parts of speech,Īre you really going to lick that ice cream off of the floor?īut I am disregarding those other meanings.) (A similar experiment could be used to eliminate parts of speech which more obviously do not fit, such as prepositions, demonstratives, articles, conjunctions, and so on.)

Thus, this set of words does not seem to fit any of the main part of speech roles. ( Extremely does not work as an adjective) If any of those parts of speech is replaced by a word like very, extremely, etc., the sentence does not seem to be grammatical. To demonstrate this, here is an example sentence with a noun, an adjective, a verb, and an adverb: While working on developing the lexicon in one of my constructed languages, I encountered a slight difficulty in using standard classifications for words like very, extremely, really, and quite.

What part of speech is the word this