Adverbs

In this video we are going to talk about the adverb. Adverb, what is it? Well, the adverb describes a verb. And this is very important because traditionally we think of, oh, adjectives, adjectives do the describing, they describe nouns. But wait a second, what is it when we have a word that describes a verb?

Aha, we need another part of speech, and that's the adverb. So what does it mean to describe a verb? Well, here we have talks and grows. And there's always a great question here. Describing a verb, you can always ask how? How does someone talk?

He talks softly. He talks loudly. In both cases, we end with ly. Ly and ly. This is a giveaway that we are dealing with an adverb. And so so we do not say he talks soft, because that would be modifying a verb with an adjective, and we do not do that.

So adverb is special in that it describes a verb, and we differentiate it from an adjective with this ly ending. Let's look at grows. The plant grows steady. What's wrong with that? Well, steady describes something that's constant. It describes something. Aha, it's an adjective. We're describing a verb. We need an adverb. How does something grow? And so, the way, we don't say steadly, we put steadily. And so sometimes it's not just a question of adding on ly, but you can see little changes here with adding an extra vowel. But, otherwise in most cases with adverbs, you add the ly at the end. And so you could, of course, modify. You could come up with so many different adverbs describing how something grows. Something can grow quickly.

Notice the ly at the end. So let's look, take a look now at some other examples. Starting with the boy greedily ate the hotdog. What did he do? Well, we're describing how he ate something. He didn't eat it slowly. He didn't eat it pensively, meaning he is thinking deeply while he's eating it. Rather, he is eating it how? He is eating it greedily. Notice the ly at the end. And, again, sometimes we add a vowel there. So it's not greedly, but we modify that adjective and change it into an adverb by adding the ily, and we get greedily. The boy greedily ate the hotdog. And here we have our adverb. Next, Gary speaks English well. How does Gary speak? How does he speak English? He speaks English well.

Now notice that we have an irregular adverb because good is an adjective. But we don't have the word goodly, Gary speaks English goodly. Maybe that sounds funny to you, and it should, because there's no such word. Instead, when good changes from an adjective to an adverb it becomes the word well. So again, Gary speaks English well.

And then we have C. She never drives in the rain. Well, there's the verb, and we're talking about how, and in this case, how often. And so then we don't have an ly ending here. The word that describes the verb, drives, is never. So, therefore, never is functioning as an adverb.

So, therefore, you do not always have to add an ly to a word. It depends. But typically if you have an adjective, greedy, you change it by adding ily, or just by adding an ly. And that goes with most words, slowly, quietly, etc. But you always want to be careful.

Two words that change, such as good and well, change in unpredictable fashion. Or words that are simply adverbs all the time, such as never. And again, there's no such word as neverly. It doesn't exist, but never is an adverb itself. And here we have now gone through the different types of adverbs you can expect with regular and irregular.