An adverb is not a preposition.

When I wrote Puzzling prepositions? Why grammarians should stop being contrary four years ago, I did not fully understand the extent of Bas Aarts and Geoffrey Pullum's linguistic perversity. But since then, I've had the benefit of reading Bas Aarts's book and I've also leafed through Pullum's grammar. Something else happened recently that rekindled my interest in this subject.

I've mentioned before that I receive a lot of emails every day from readers and many of them relate to questions about grammar. I try to answer them but where possible, I will write a blog post that addresses a few of these questions at one go, as I just did in my last post.

Apart from emails, I receive many comments in my blog awaiting 'the administrator's moderation'. There are many ads disguised as comments but there are some pretty good comments too.  Recently, I received an anonymous comment from someone who seems to be partial to the Aarts/Pullum grammatical categorisation. The commentator gave me a transcript of an old interview the Australian Broadcasting Corporation had with Pullum. Pullum tried very hard to defend his classification of some adverbs as prepositions. Pullum's stand is essentially the same as Aarts's.

Of course the study of grammar has progressed and evolved considerably and this can be seen even within my lifetime alone. New names are coined. Different grammars have some differences in classification and different names may be used but these differences are usually minor. Some grammars fine-tune their categorisations a little more so that they have countless subdivisions within subdivisions. But the Aarts-Pullum reclassification is not minor; it's a huge and fundamental change. It's turning grammar as we know it inside out. And what we must not lose sight of is it is totally unnecessary. And I mean it - there is not an ounce of benefit in this exercise. It's not a case of the bad outweighing the good. It's all bad and calamitous without even a drop of anything positive for the teaching and learning of grammar. For this reason alone, the Aarts-Pullum reclassification of grammar should be ignored and I am glad schools all over the world including those in the UK are doing precisely that.

The whole world follows faithfully, and quite rightly too, the Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. If you have read the CGEL, you know there is no work of the same magnitude, depth and linguistic incisiveness. It's a grammar that has no equal and I know of no grammar that is not in some way beholden to it. Even Huddleston & Pullum's grammar for all its outrageous departure from the CGEL gives due credit to it. The writers make it clear in the Preface that they might never have attempted the grammar 'if Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik [the writers of the CGEL] had not pointed the way'.

Before I go further, it would be ungrateful of me if I did not say something about my anonymous commentator. I am very grateful to him or her for giving me the transcript of the interview with Pullum. But I can't post all comments in my blog even if they are very good, as the commentator's doubtless is. I have to be very selective. The last thing I want to do is to put my readers off the study of grammar. I try to do whatever I can in the limited time that I have to present grammar as a subject that is so simple that any child should be able to come to grips with it in just a short space of time. I try to explain everything as simply as I can. I think a discussion between the commentator and me on the subject may confuse my younger readers and it is for this reason that I have taken the liberty to write this post in which I will present all the arguments that Pullum gave in that interview and why I think they are wrong. I will paraphrase everything as clearly and succinctly as I can. My readers' comprehension and interest in the subject are of paramount importance and if an explanation becomes too convoluted and tedious, the wrong impression will be given that grammar is difficult and incomprehensible and nothing can be more untrue than that.

I read the transcript three times and each time, I could not help but ask myself, 'So what?' Pullum's departure from standard grammar classification is not just perverse and uncalled-for. What this reclassification does is to curtail the range of the adverb class which is the most heterogeneous word class in the English language, and to extend the range of prepositions. It's a case of robbing adverbs to give prepositions. I'll explain further below.

Pullum brings up for his first argument the word 'right' as an adverb which modifies adverbs and prepositions.  In my earlier blogpost,  Puzzling prepositions? Why grammarians should stop being contrary, I explained that for a split second, I found Pullum's argument that 'right' does not modify adverbs compelling but it took me only a moment to realise that 'right' governs 'there' as well.  But I received a rude shock when I realised that Pullum had reclassified 'there' as a preposition. I addressed this point quite correctly when I wrote in that blogpost:

As you can see, the only argument is in fact a circuitous one. Proponents of this view begin by saying that X is a preposition because Y modifies it and when you tell them that Y also modifies Z which is an adverb, they simply reply that they have now re-classified Z as a preposition.

From the transcript of the interview I can see quite clearly the fundamental flaws that Pullum has made. I must state from the outset that my judgement is based purely on what I obtained from the transcript.  I won't repeat what I have already said in that blogspot.  What I wish to do here is simply to refute Pullum's arguments in the transcript.


Don't ignore the full range of an adverb.

Many people don't really know what an adverb is. When Pullum appeals to his interviewer's general understanding of what an adverb is he says 'Real adverbs typically (though not always) end in “-ly”.' He doesn't elaborate but from what he says further, it's clear what he means. There are words accepted as adverbs by all dictionaries (including the OED) and almost all linguists on this planet that Pullum does not accept as 'real adverbs'. This notion that an adverb typically ends in '-ly' is as puerile a notion as you can get and frankly, Pullum's stripping away from the adverb its many other functions does leave us with nothing more than a kindergarten understanding of what an adverb is.

But of course Mac must have used 'hopefully' as an adverb.

It's the angry man who is ignorant of the full range of an adverb.

He probably means an 'adjunct' and not an 'adverb'.

But it would be ridiculous to suggest that Pullum does not understand the full ambit of the adverb. Even his students, I have no doubt, are fully aware of it. But in order to further his agenda to cut back on the role of the adverb and to transfer some of it to the preposition, it makes sense for him to take the stand that 'real adverbs' cannot be modified by 'right' or some other verbs. I have already shown in my earlier blogpost how wrong that is.

Pullum goes on to his second argument. He says:

There is a class of verbs that demand locative or directional prepositional phrases to accompany them. 

He gives this example 'Put the water on the table'.

But this is not entirely correct. While it is true that a prepositional phrase usually follows such verbs, Pullum seems to focus only on the structural format of the sentence and he has totally ignored the functional analysis of it. Functionally, it's the adverbial that such a verb demands. The adverbial may be a prepositional phrase but it does not necessarily have to be one. The prepositional phrase in Pullum's example can be easily replaced by, for example, the adverbial clause 'where you last saw it' or even a simple adverb 'here'.

I should add a word of caution about labels. While the terms I use are usually the same as those used in the CGEL, some grammars may use a different name. Sidney Greenbaum who co-authors the CGEL calls an obligatory adverbial a 'complement' in another grammar and in a later grammar, he chooses to call it an 'adverbial complement'. There is no problem here at all. Any reader knows precisely what it is and what its properties are.

Pullum gives another example. He says that in the sentence 'Put the water in the centre of the table', one cannot substitute an adverb e.g. 'centrally' for the prepositional phrase. Of course you can't. Different phrases have different meanings and naturally, the precision of space that the prepositional phrase expresses cannot be replicated by a mere adverb. That's what a prepositional phrase is for - to fix the precise position relative to the noun phrase. 'Centrally' carries a different semantic meaning.  Nobody denies that a prepositional phrase is capable of injecting more detail into the sentence than a single adverb when we want to express a spatial relationship with the noun phrase. When the Australian English word 'bush' cannot be modified by 'right', Pullum is quick to say that it is 'because its meaning is inappropriate' but he does not seem to allow the same reason to the other side of the argument and he makes ludicrous suggestions such as:

But notice, you can say “Mike headed into the country” but you can’t say "Mike headed rurally".  

Of course you can't say that. The meaning is inappropriate. The inability of some adverbs or verbs to be modifed by some other adverbs is no reason to reclassify these words. It's the same with Pullum's reclassification. As he readily admits, his newly named prepositions can't be modified by some adverbs.

Pullum's prepositions that don't take objects are Aarts's intransitive prepositions. They are nothing more than adjuncts of place.

Renaming some adverbs as prepositions may seem like an innocuous exercise but it affects very seriously our understanding of what a prepositional phrase is. The obligatory complement in the prepositional phrase is affected for adverbs that are renamed prepositions because an adverbial phrase does not function the same way as a prepositional phrase. And what happens to the phrasal prepositional verb?

In Pullum's reclassification of adverbs and prepositions, the subtleties and fine distinctions of grammatical analyses will be lost. For example, in 'He ran up a bill/hill', our correct grammatical analysis captures the subtle distinction in the function of 'up' in both sentences whereas Pullum's analysis ignores it totally.

I can see absolutely no justification for this newfangled reclassification. What Pullum and Aarts are doing amounts to nothing more than an exercise in futility. But it's an exercise that will make English grammar even less attractive to the English-speaking world than it already is. Parents are already up in arms against the introduction of grammar in the school curriculum. There are angry protests in every school around the globe that attempts to teach schoolchildren English grammar.  I'd like to see Pullum and Aarts standing in front of a sea of angry parents with the news that what their kids have learnt in school has now been substantially revised so that some subordinators (not all but just some) have now become prepositions and the same applies to some adverbs (not all but just some).