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I'm trying to form the following sentence:

...we can talk more substantiatively in the event that X occurs.

The term "substantiatively" isn't in either the computer dictionary or online at m-w.com. However, it seems to me that if something can be substantiative, then something can be done substantiatively. More generally, if something can be described as <adjective>, then one can do it <adverb form of adjective>. Is that assertion incorrect?

choster
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eykanal
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    In general, yes, although there are many exceptions, e.g. determiners. By the way, I have never heard of substantiative. Perhaps you mean substantial or substantive (less likely)? – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Mar 04 '16 at 17:49
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    @Cerberus - I'm just going off m-w.com. I won't rule out the possibility that I'm just making stuff up. That's within the realm of possibilisnosity. – eykanal Mar 04 '16 at 18:58
  • @Cerberus: Coleridge seems to have loved the word substantiative. From his Notebooks: 1827–1834: "By the conception of SUBSTANCE ingenerated a priori, i.e. by the influence of Reason the Mediate Faculty becomes Understanding, i.e. substantiative, substituent—; but this not being drawn from the Sense or the Senses (= Sense + Sensation or ..." – Sven Yargs Mar 04 '16 at 20:23
  • ..but a number of the matches for substantiative in Google Books search results are clearly typographical errors or misstatements of substantive, as in a law text that refers to "substantiative due process" ("substantive due process" is a very familiar set phrase in U.S. law). – Sven Yargs Mar 04 '16 at 20:26
  • @Cerberus I don't think that many see determiners/determinatives as being in the class of adjectives. Some dictionaries haven't caught up with accepted classification yet. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 06 '16 at 19:51
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    @EdwinAshworth: If you don't mind my saying, is it fair to call all of those exceptions? I'd also classify words like many and all as adjectives. – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Mar 24 '16 at 03:33
  • Some exceptions would seem to be (though I've not checked in OED): (a) some identity adjectives: same, other / (b) some ordinal adjectives: preceding, further / (c) some degree adjectives (?): outright (d) some temporal adjectives: future, then [past, now? once?] / (e) other adjectives referring to how assembled (or envisaged-as-a-set) referents co-relate: assorted (?), fellow / (f) adjectives of potential / lack of (etc) ...: budding, would-be, wannabe, manqué / (g) modal and veridical (including privative) adjectives: fake. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 24 '16 at 17:05
  • (a) Yes; you are right: not all of these examples resist agglutination. I'm assuming OP means other than zero conversion (or rather the existence of a categorial polyseme) by 'form an adverb from [an] adjective'. Obviously, 'outright' and 'further' double as adverbs. However, 'disparately' and 'diversely' obviously exist. Sloppy of me. // (b) Regard 'many' and 'all' as adjectives? Very few (if any) grammarians do nowadays: See John Lawler's post here (and many others). – Edwin Ashworth Mar 24 '16 at 17:06
  • ... And (@Cerberus) this article at Bright Hub. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 24 '16 at 17:19
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    Some apparent exceptions to the rule that you can form an adverb from an adjective are due to miscategorizing things as adjectives just because they can be noun modifiers. You can have "the above examples" and not "abovely", but that's because "above" is actually a preposition. You can have "the sleeping child" and not "sleepingly", but that is because "sleeping" is actually a verb in the participle form. – Greg Lee Jan 31 '17 at 04:08
  • There are some cases where it gets kind of silly: Pope Paul performed mass more holily than did Pope John. – Hot Licks May 31 '17 at 11:12
  • @EdwinAshworth There are so many blocked cases here that I feel like we need a real expert. Why can an alert listener listen alertly but an awake one not listen awakely? Why can a bigger idea not be expressed biggerly? – tchrist Jul 30 '17 at 22:21
  • @GregLee Zero derivation works for inside jobs being done inside, but there are so many classes of adjectives blocked from -ly derivation to adverbs that I struggle to come up with an overarching “rule” to describe these. – tchrist Jul 30 '17 at 22:27
  • @tchrist This article, Katamba F. (1993): Productivity in Word-Formation., obviously addressed the views on the accepted limits on productiveness (and how they were then changing), but I can't access all of it. I haven't found an article addressing the reasons so many potentially derived adverbs are absent from the lexicon (though this might). Though apparently, ... – Edwin Ashworth Jul 30 '17 at 23:09
  • in Khwarshi 'there are no productive ways to form adverbs'. – Edwin Ashworth Jul 30 '17 at 23:12

2 Answers2

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I think the original question should be about talking more substantively. The other looks like a misprint to me. The OED attests these substa- adverbs:

substantially [adv.]
† substanˈtifically [adv.] ← substanˈtific
† subˈstantiously [adv.]
substanˈtivally [adv.] ← substantival
substantively [adv.]

In general, there are many words that modern grammars classify as adjectives (rather than as determiners or various other noun modifiers) which you cannot convert into adverbs merely by suffixing them with -ly via derivational morphology.

Here are some examples of things that don’t work out when you try to do that with them:

  • You can look for an only son, but you can’t *onlily find him.

  • An alert listener listens alertly, but an awake one cannot listen *awakely.

  • A bigger idea can never be expressed *biggerly.

  • Although secret plans can be divulged secretly, small plans cannot be made *smally.

  • You can interview an old, white, European man, but you can interview him neither *oldly nor *whitely nor *Europeanly.

  • If the judge gave you a deferred sentence, you still haven’t been sentenced *deferredly.

  • People who like twice-baked potatoes don’t cook *twice-bakedly.

  • Just because you find yourself blessed with kittens galore doesn’t mean you’ve been *galorely blessed.

  • If you went looking for men who were awake, such men could not be *awakely found.

  • People who support their home teams are not *homely supporting those teams. And homely people are something else altogether.

  • Homing pigeons are not just pigeons flown *homingly.

  • If the position required a professor emeritus, it could not be filled *emeritusly.

  • A daily gardening column is not a column published *daylily, only one published daily — even if it happens to be about daylilies. :)

  • Although you can extract bodily fluids, you cannot extract them *bodilily.

The only adjectives you can convert into adverbs by affixing -ly to them are those that fit into the pattern:

in an ADJECTIVE manner

Those ones you can derive adverbs of manner out of via -ly. The rest you cannot.

(Notice how this rules out adjectives that can occur only postnominally, such as galore.)

And even some fitting that pattern are normally blocked for other reason; most people aren’t comfortable with converting -ly adjectives into -lily adverbs.

tchrist
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  • OP's general question seems to be answered, but specifically can substantiative be made into an adverb? Would it become an adverb of manner? – Zan700 Jul 30 '17 at 22:25
  • @Zan700 The question was about modifiers not about substantives. To derive an adverb from a substantive like a noun sometimes(?) requires that it first be converted into an adjective. Throwing a ball "like a girl" would be throwing it girlishly not girly or gurlily. There's a good reason that prepositions exist in the language: too much derivation sounds bad, and sometimes any derivation at all is too much. – tchrist Jul 30 '17 at 22:30
  • @Zan700 Usage trumps patterning that one might expect. Productivity, as has been stated before, is a gradable feature of English. Asking 'Can substantiative be made into an adverb?' is like asking 'Can I verb idiosyncrasy?' Dictionaries (or rather the combined output of respected dictionaries, particularly OED) show (to a first approximation) what is in the lexicon. 'Will I get away with 'alright' / 'alot' / 'irregardless' / 'contrafibularities' / 'fluddle' / 'dord' / 'schnabbertift' ...?' Well, who's doing the judging, and why do you want to? – Edwin Ashworth Jul 30 '17 at 22:52
  • @Tchrist I wasn't referring to substantives but to substantiative, the word that according to Sven is defined (at least by Coleridge) "By the conception of SUBSTANCE ingenerated a priori . . ." Edwin notes that "Usage trumps patterning that one might expect," Fine. But whether or not substantiatively was ever used, is substantiative one of "Those ones you can derive adverbs of manner out of via -ly.?" – Zan700 Jul 30 '17 at 23:28
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    @Zan700 I don't know of any XXX-ive adjectives that resist manner-adverbial derivation via -ly using the in an XXX-ive manner “rule”. – tchrist Jul 31 '17 at 00:15
  • @Edwin If I come across gnxp in an English text, I know immediately it's not an English word because it contains no vowels. If I come across captively, I might not immediately rule it out as an adverb because I know captive is an accepted adjective that ends in ive, so could take an ly. But I would then have to consider if it could somehow be "an adverb of manner." Knowing the definition of captive as an adjective, I can't grasp the word as "an adverb of manner," so I would rule it out as adverb in the English lexicon before consulting the OED. – Zan700 Jul 31 '17 at 08:00
  • @Zan700 Your rule is incorrect according to this Wikipedia article and all other treatments I'm aware of. Hm / hmm / sh / brrr (but not shh). 'Rules' we like to trot out are often pseudo-rules, guidelines with varying numbers of exceptions. // I can grasp a manner meaning for 'captively' if it existed (and Wikipedia and almost 200 000 hits on the internet strongly suggest it does). ?'Their attention was hardly held captively.' (The depictive construction 'held captive' is normal, of course.) – Edwin Ashworth Jul 31 '17 at 11:23
  • 'Recently' is from 'recent', which seems to be an exception to 'The only adjectives you can convert into adverbs by affixing -ly to them are those that fit into the pattern: "in an ADJECTIVE manner" '. As does frequency adverb 'rarely' from 'rare'. (I assume you're including past conversions.) – Edwin Ashworth Jul 31 '17 at 11:49
  • Thanks, this is a good answer. It does beg the question of what difference exists between the two types of adjectives you mention (those that work as "...in a XX manner" and those that don't). I'd be curious if this is formalized in grammar or if it's just another idiosyncrasy of the English language. – eykanal Jul 31 '17 at 12:49
  • @Edwin: Nor my rule exactly. That Wikipedia article continues on to say, "That In most languages of the world, all or nearly all lexical words have vowel sounds, and English is no exception." It's hardly a surprise that "rules," or even "pseudo-rules" have exceptions. Try it with "motive." – Zan700 Jul 31 '17 at 13:22
  • @Zan700 You claim to use the rule; you cite the rule as if it's gospel: it's acceptable to call it 'your rule'. // What I'm pointing out is that 'If I come across _____ in an English text, I know immediately it's not an English word because it contains no vowels.' is incorrect because some English words contain no vowels. // Usage trumps patterning that one might expect means that the correct thing to do is to look in OED etc for proof of lexicality. If a word is not listed there (and not in ODO, AHD, Collins ...), this does not mean it isn't in the lexis. But you can't just assume ... – Edwin Ashworth Jul 31 '17 at 15:03
  • that it is. Wordness is notoriously difficult to define (are two mentions in reliable periodicals etc enough for a candidate to qualify? Two hundred? Which periodicals etc are 'reliable'? Does an obsolete label in OED remove a word from the lexis?) But whether or not an affix may be used in a specific conversion is determined by whether the new candidate word is accepted into the lexis, not by how many times the process has worked in the past. – Edwin Ashworth Jul 31 '17 at 15:04
  • @Edwin A rhetorical convenience. So the judges you earlier referred to are those that accept the "new candidate word" into the lexis? – Zan700 Jul 31 '17 at 15:22
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    @Zan700 I was referring to the people at the pub/club, who might stop talking to you. The teachers who might mark you down. The interview board that might choose the other candidate. The editor who might fire you.... 'Can I make a new word by applying this 'rule' that seems to work some of the time?' We don't even agree on what 'word' means on ELU. // Live funly. – Edwin Ashworth Jul 31 '17 at 15:33
  • @Edwin Ah, that old bête noire, the world. – Zan700 Jul 31 '17 at 15:48
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    @Zan This is called English Language and Usage. – Edwin Ashworth Jul 31 '17 at 15:53
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There is no rule that any adjective can form an adverb, however there seem to be few that have not done so at least once in literature, so could be regarded as "legitimate".

  • Long in the context of time can be replaced with slowly. – ArtOfCode Mar 04 '16 at 18:17
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    Easy can be turned into an adverb--easily – CHEESE Mar 04 '16 at 18:33
  • Redly, longly, and complexly all appear both in dictionaries and in the wild. – deadrat Mar 04 '16 at 18:46
  • I removed "long" from the examples I gave because as with many adjectives it is an adverb too, without change of spelling. –  Mar 04 '16 at 20:02
  • On the other hand, the adjective rewritten, as in "a rewritten essay," doesn't yield an adverbial form that I've ever seen used. – Sven Yargs Mar 04 '16 at 20:12
  • Certainly complexly is legitimate. – Hot Licks Mar 04 '16 at 20:22
  • I have removed complexly as an example, as although it is extremely rare it is legitimate. –  Mar 06 '16 at 19:31
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    I have rewritten my answer because my examples of adjectives which do not form adverbs have all turned out to be "legitimate". In my original answer I was thinking of common usage rather than legitimacy. I now know I was wrong. –  Mar 06 '16 at 19:55
  • @ArtOfCode: True, but you're inherently rephrasing by switching to the adverb. You wouldn't have said that "the passage of time was long", so you wouldn't be trying to say that "time passed longly" in the first place. There's no connection between slowly as an adverb, and long as an adjective. Unless I'm glossing over a case that does not rephrase the entire sentence? – Flater May 31 '17 at 08:13