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Adjectives in -ly can form inflected comparative and superlative forms (such as friendlier, friendliest, lovelier, loveliest), but most adverbs with this ending do not (a word such as sweetly uses the periphrastic forms more sweetly, most sweetly). For more details see Adverbs and Comparison in the English grammar article.
William Bullokar wrote the earliest grammar of English, published in 1586.It includes a chapter on adverbs. His definition follows: An adverb is a part of speech joined with a verb or participle to declare their signification more expressly by such adverb: as, come hither if they wilt go forth, sometimes with an adjective: as, thus broad: & sometimes joined with another adverb: as, how soon ...
Many English adverbs are formed from adjectives by adding the ending -ly, as in hopefully, widely, theoretically (for details of spelling and etymology, see -ly). Certain words can be used as both adjectives and adverbs, such as fast, straight, and hard; these are flat adverbs. In earlier usage more flat adverbs were accepted in formal usage ...
For example, one effect of the English derivational suffix -ly is to change an adjective into an adverb (slow → slowly). Here are examples of English derivational patterns and their suffixes: adjective-to-noun: -ness (slow → slowness) adjective-to-verb: -en (weak → weaken) adjective-to-adjective: -ish (red → reddish)
An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a determiner, a clause, a preposition, or a sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, or level of certainty by answering questions such as how , in what way , when , where , to what extent .
The term includes words that naturally end in -ly in both forms, e.g. "drive friendly". Flat adverbs were once quite common but have been largely replaced by their -ly counterparts. In the 18th century, grammarians believed flat adverbs to be adjectives, and insisted that adverbs needed to end in -ly.
The comparative degrees are frequently associated with adjectives and adverbs because these words take the -er suffix or modifying word more or less. (e.g., faster, more intelligent, less wasteful). Comparison can also, however, appear when no adjective or adverb is present, for instance with nouns (e.g., more men than women).
There is typically little confusion between nouns and adverbs in English because there is no overlap in the inflectional morphology that they take (-s for nouns, -er and -est for adverbs) and they tend to cooccur with different kinds of words (e.g., nouns can head phrases containing determinatives while adverbs cannot). Further, nouns and ...