A Typology of Word Categoriessubcategorise in the same way as these adjectives – like the present tense verb
subcategorises in the same way as the past tense verb. There are some cases where this
might well be true:
(123) a the newspapers were independent of the government
b the newspapers operated independently of the government
In this example, both the adjective (independent) and the adverb (independently) take the
same prepositional complement. In other cases, however, this does not seem to work:
(124) a he was very fond of his sister
b we were all anxious that the plan should succeed
(125) a he thought about his visit fondly of his sister
b we met at the arranged time anxiously that the plan should succeed
These observations raise a number of perplexing questions. Why, for example, do
adjectives and adverbs differ in this way? And why are some cases of adverbs with
complements ok? Comparing (124) with (125) we can see a difference in the functions
of the adjectives and adverbs: whereas the adjectives are functioning as the predicate
of the sentence, the adverb plays a modifying role, modifying the verb in these cases.
It turns out that when adjectives function as modifiers, they also cannot take the
complements that they usually can:
(126) a a very fond of his sister boy
b an anxious that the plan should succeed band of pirates
Thus, it turns out that this is not a difference which divides adjectives and adverbs, but
a property that unifies them. Under what circumstance can an adverb have a
complement then? If what we said above is correct, we predict that adverbs can only
take a complement when they do not function as modifiers. This is indeed true in
(123b) where the adverb functions as a complement of the verb. It is quite unusual to
find an adverb in a non-modifying role and, therefore, it is not at all usual to find
adverb with complements.
3.4.4 Prepositions
The last thematic category we will consider is prepositions. The pattern with nouns in
being [–V] and with verbs in being [–N] and therefore do not share any feature with
adjectives, apart from [–F] as they are both thematic.
Morphologically there is very little to say about this category as they tend to be
morphologically simple and do not have inflectional forms. However, this is a property
that we may use to identify an instance of the category: they are the category that do
not have plural, tensed, comparative or superlative forms:
(127) with withs withed wither withest
by bys byed byer byest
to tos toed toer toest
There are a small number of exceptions to these observations. For example inner
might be claimed to be a comparative form of in, ins is a possible plural (as in ins and
outs) and toing is a progressive based on the preposition to (as in toing and froing).