I've noticed in working with grammar for many years that sometimes what I would normally call a "prepositional phrase" is now called an "adverbial phrase" by writers of textbooks, English tests, etc. How to I help my students not become completely confused?
Examples:
Before noon, I will have graded sixteen essays. (Prepositional or Adverbial Phrase?)
The student will write with many big words. (PP or Adv P.?)
Snow will blow all during the night.
Do these two types of phrases overlap? Is one a subset of the other? What am I missing?
Thanks for any help you can provide!
The answer is Yes. They are actually both Prepositional Phrases and Adverbial Phrases.
They are prepositional phrases because they contain a preposition and an object of the preposition. When marking the parts of speech, they would be marked as such.
They are also Adverbial Phrases because of how they function in the sentence, their role. They answer the questions of an adverb: When? and How? Therefore they function as an adverb when parsing a sentence.
I require my students to say when parsing, "Prepositional phrase, adverbial" when identifying a prepositional phrase.
One could also have "prepositional phrase, adjectival" as in this example.
The boy in the field threw the ball. "In the field" answers the question, "Which boy?" and therefore functions in the sentence as an adjective.
The answer is Yes. They are actually both Prepositional Phrases and Adverbial Phrases.
They are prepositional phrases because they contain a preposition and an object of the preposition. When marking the parts of speech, they would be marked as such.
They are also Adverbial Phrases because of how they function in the sentence, their role. They answer the questions of an adverb: When? and How? Therefore they function as an adverb when parsing a sentence.
I require my students to say when parsing, "Prepositional phrase, adverbial" when identifying a prepositional phrase.
One could also have "prepositional phrase, adjectival" as in this example.
The boy in the field threw the ball. "In the field" answers the question, "Which boy?" and therefore functions in the sentence as an adjective.
I very much dislike the term adverbial. I think it is very unsatisfactory to have a function term that is morphologically derived from a category term. Adverb is a word category, and adverb phrase (a phrase headed by an adverb) the corresponding phrase category. Adverbial is a function and may be realised by an AdvP (He spoke quickly), a PP (He spoke with enthusiasm), an NP (He’s speaking this evening). AdvPs do not always function as adjuncts: they may function as modifier in AdjPs (It was quite amazingly expensive), etc.
Adverbial phrase is quite often used for any phrase functioning as adverbial and hence likely to be confused with adverb phrase.
