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In linguistics, an adverbial phrase ("AdvP") is a multi-word expression operating adverbially: its syntactic function is to modify other expressions, including verbs, adjectives, adverbs, adverbials, and sentences.
In phrase structure grammars such as generative grammar, the verb phrase is one headed by a verb. It may be composed of only a single verb, but typically it consists of combinations of main and auxiliary verbs, plus optional specifiers, complements (not including subject complements), and adjuncts. For example:
An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering questions such as how, in what way, when, where, to what extent.
English adverbs are words such as so, just, how, well, also, very, even, only, really, and why that head adverb phrases, and whose most typical members function as modifiers in verb phrases and clauses, along with adjective and adverb phrases.
Word classes, largely corresponding to traditional parts of speech (e.g. noun, verb, preposition, etc.), are syntactic categories. In phrase structure grammars, the phrasal categories (e.g. noun phrase, verb phrase, prepositional phrase, etc.) are also syntactic categories.
An adverbial consists of either a single adverb, an adverbial phrase, or an adverbial clause that modifies either the verb or the sentence as a whole. Some traditional grammars consider adpositional phrases a type of adverb, but many grammars treat these as separate.
A verbal noun, as a type of nonfinite verb form, is a term that some grammarians still use when referring to gerunds, gerundives, supines, and nominal forms of infinitives. In English however, verbal noun has most frequently been treated as a synonym for gerund .
After the two latter types of adverbial, only one-word lexical verb forms (Present Simple or Past Simple), not auxiliary verbs, participate in inversion, and only with noun-phrase subjects, not pronominal subjects.
In the traditional grammar of Modern English, a phrasal verb typically constitutes a single semantic unit consisting of a verb followed by a particle (examples: turn down, run into or sit up ), sometimes collocated with a preposition (examples: get together with, run out of or feed off of ).
In grammar, a phrase—called expression in some contexts—is a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adjective phrase "very happy". Phrases can consist of a single word or a complete sentence.