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In my english lesson today i was told that "afterwards" is an intransitive adverb (I cannot write "afterwards this") while "after" is a transitive adverb. Is this distinction transitive/intransitive grammatically correct?

Johannes Wentu
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  • May we ask who sold you that? – Tushar Raj May 27 '15 at 12:15
  • After looking at it in a completely different way i found this: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/180398/whats-the-difference-between-after-and-afterwards – Johannes Wentu May 27 '15 at 12:18
  • @Tushar, we use to say "name the sin, not the sinner". I already wrote too much for that matter :) – Johannes Wentu May 27 '15 at 12:19
  • Asking not to assign blame, but to establish the credibility of the source. – Tushar Raj May 27 '15 at 12:20
  • From this: http://blog.writeathome.com/index.php/2012/12/when-a-preposition-is-an-adverb/ I undersand that a preposition can be transitive or intransitive and in the latter case it is behaving as an adverb... but i can't understand if it must be considered as a full fledged adverb or not. And i still have the doubt that it is possible to say a preposition is (in)transitive as i always heard this qualification only for verbs. – Johannes Wentu May 27 '15 at 12:45
  • For me, that's nothing but confusion of grammar terms. – rogermue May 27 '15 at 13:41
  • I'm afraid I agree with @rogermue. There's no such thing as a "full-fledged adverb"; adverb is a usage, and there are relatively few words in English (most of them marked with -ly) that are restricted to adverbial usage. Most prepositions form adverbial phrases, and most subordinating conjunctions form adverbial clauses, but that doesn't make them "full-fledged". Geoff Pullum calls particles in phrasal verbs "intransitive prepositions", and I think that's a decent label for them. Afterwards, by contrast, is a compound of a preposition with (what remains of) its object. A frozen phrase. – John Lawler May 27 '15 at 15:33
  • @JohnLawler Agreed - apart from maybe about Afterwards. Pullum regards Afterwards as a preposition. It has most of the syntactic properties of prepositions, after all. In other words it can occur as a complement of BE, is modifiable by straight and right, not modifiable by very, can post-modify nouns and so forth. – Araucaria - Him May 27 '15 at 17:19
  • @Araucaria: No problem. I voted to reopen. – Tushar Raj Jun 01 '15 at 11:21
  • It should be noted that "afterwards" basically means "after this" or "after that", and it simply makes no sense to write "after this this". Not sure it has anything to do with the adverbosity of the word, – Hot Licks Jun 01 '15 at 11:48

2 Answers2

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In traditional grammar, words such as before were given different parts of speech according to what words they appeared before. According to this treatment we would see the following classifications in the following examples:

  • I saw her before [the concert started]. (conjunction before clause)
  • I saw her before [the concert]. (preposition before noun phrase)
  • I had seen her before[]. (adverb without following complement)

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, some linguists have been arguing that this type of classification is silly. After all, we don't do this with verbs:

  • I know [the doctor will be there] (verb before clause)
  • I know [the doctor] (verb before noun phrase)
  • I know []. (verb without a following complement)

In modern grammars such as The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language words such as before and after are prepositions in each of the examples further above. This is sensible because these words retain the same syntactic properties regardless of what kind of complement they take.

In the example I have seen her before the phrase before can be analysed as an intransitive use of a preposition. In the OP's example the word afterwards can be analysed as a preposition which is always intransitive. However, grammarians would not normally refer to afterwards as an intransitive adverb. The reason is that if its an adverb, then it's intransitive anyway. Adverbs hardly ever take complements - they're nearly all 'intransitive'.

Araucaria - Him
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  • +1 . . . . aside: ain't it getting old for you to be repeating the same lessons over and over again? Oh, wait, you be a teacher! I understand now. :D – F.E. May 27 '15 at 17:52
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Searching on google for "intransivite/transitive adverbs" give no suitable results but proposes "intransitive/transitive verbs" so I guess someone misspell some words and your answer is no.

An article about intransitive/transitive verbs.

Yohann V.
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  • Thank you Yohann. Unfortunately, i had already searched for this on Google and i could not find anything and this is why i decided to ask here the opinion of some experts. Also, there do not seem to be questions relative to this issue in stackexchange. But the fact that intransitive adverbs do not appear in google is not a source good enough to be brought to my good teacher. – Johannes Wentu May 27 '15 at 12:04
  • @JohannesWentu I think the contrary but I was just underline this fact. If it does not answer to you, I fully understand and wish you better answers. – Yohann V. May 27 '15 at 12:21