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I'll create some random examples:

"I'll take the elevator to go to the 12th floor."

"I'll take the lift to get up there."

Now, let us use the same sentences treating the noun as an adverb:

"I'll go elevatorly to the 12th floor."

"I'll get up there liftly."

I'm pretty sure that this would be well understood in a trivial context, but would that be stupid?

Is there a real example of this in the english language?

A last and more stupid example:

"The witch flew broomly through the skies." haha

Ericson Willians
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  • I guess it is possible in some cases like Luck:Luckily but your examples seem unacceptable "grammatically"(see what I did there?) – Pawan Jul 14 '13 at 19:56
  • How would you act the adverb: liftly? Normally if someone were to tell you they went somewhere slowly you could imagine that action and mimic it. So to open a door slowly, to drive a car slowly are possible variations. How would you utilize "liftly" or "broomly" outside the specific contexts you provided? – Mari-Lou A Jul 14 '13 at 19:58
  • The adverb would be used to change the verb normally, but according to the function of the noun depending on the context. For example "To clean broomly the house." In this context, the function of the broom is not that of a "flying thing". – Ericson Willians Jul 14 '13 at 20:02
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    Nouns get used as adverbs all the time. They just don’t need a -ly to do so. – tchrist Jul 14 '13 at 20:04
  • I suppose, "To clean broomly" would answer the question how you cleaned the house! :) – Mari-Lou A Jul 14 '13 at 20:05
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    Use of the -ly suffix sounds stupid, I'm afraid. Overcompensating. But Zero derivation can work: I'll go elevator to the 12th floor and escalator the rest of the way. It's like deleting prepositions; in context, anything predictable can be deleted (or, from the listener's point of view, can be inserted) if it makes sense. – John Lawler Jul 14 '13 at 20:07
  • Yes, this sounds wrong. – Mitch Jul 14 '13 at 20:20
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    Consider: “I’ll call you the day after tomorrow.”** There you have an NP acting adverbially and without benefit of any sort of preposition or case inflection. It’s easy to do this with time, harder but not always impossible with other relationships. Another easy one is the noun home, which slips easily and smoothly into an adverbial role without raising any supercilious eyebrows. – tchrist Jul 14 '13 at 20:58
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    Perfect examples. "home" is a perfect one. So it becomes stupid when you explicitly turn it into an adverb by adding the -ly suffix. But, in fact, "I'll go homely" has a very different role compared to "I'll go home". In the aforesaid, the "homely" transfer its "function" to the verb in the same way that happened in my examples ("liftly"). Considering that "house" does not have a "function" that can be combined with "to go", it would be nonsense (Perhaps: "I'll shelter myself homely.") haha meaning "I'm going to shelter myself in a home-like way." – Ericson Willians Jul 14 '13 at 21:21
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    @ Ericson Willians: Note that homely (and friendly, cowardly, kingly, scholarly, monthly, etc.) are *adjectives, not adverbs*. – FumbleFingers Jul 15 '13 at 00:05
  • As a suffix forming adverbs, -ly is used exclusively for adjectives, never nouns—that’s the only thing that really makes your examples not work. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 15 '13 at 17:05

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The suffix -wise can be used to transform a noun into an adverb. A classic example is clockwise.

Consider this comment in the Compact OED:

In modern English the suffix -wise is attached to nouns to form a sentence adverb meaning ‘concerning or with respect to’, as in confidence-wise, tax-wise, price-wise, time-wise, news-wise, and culture-wise. The suffix is very productive and widely used in modern English but most of the words so formed are considered inelegant or not good English style.

A search at findtheword.info for *wise reveals 356 recognized terms, most of which seem to be a strain.

bib
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