The English Language english language

Delahunty and Garvey

A note on “Adverbial”
The term “adverbial” refers to adverb phrases and all other expression types
that function in the ways that adverb phrases do, namely, as modifiers of
almost all parts of speech except nouns. Besides adverb phrases, preposi-
tional phrases (bolded), e.g., She drove with great caution (cf. She drove
cautiously), noun phrases (bolded), e.g., They do that a lot, (cf. They do that
frequently), and deictic words (bolded), e.g., There’s nobody here may func-
tion as adverbials.

the prepositional phrase (pp)

The following are typical prepositional phrases:

(11) a. on the waterfront

b. of human bondage

c. beyond the blue horizon

d. from the halls of Montezuma

e. with malice toward none

From a functional point of view, PPs are very simple: they consist of a head
preposition and an object or complement, which is typically an NP. We can
represent this as:

(12) Head + Object

From a structural point of view, each of the PPs in (11) consists of a prepo-
sition followed by a noun phrase, and we can represent their basic structure as:

(13) PP

P NP

This phrase structure tree is generated by the following PSR:

(14) PP ——> P NP

We read this PSR as: a PP consists of a P followed by an NP. Noun phrases
are discussed in more detail later in this chapter. All you need to know now
is the list of single- and multi-word prepositions presented in the chapter on
Minor Parts of Speech.