Grammar: adjectives and adverbs (lesson & exercise)

Lesson:

This quick lesson looks at three different uses of adverbs and compares them to adjectives - a topic that is easy for some students and more difficult for others.

Most, but not all, adjectives can be recognised by the '-ly' suffix at the end. Please note that some words, like 'friendly' and 'homely' are adjectives even though they end with '-ly'. Note, though, that 'friend' and 'home' are not adjectives. An '-ly' adverb is formed by adding '-ly' to an adjective.

For example, 'clear', 'true', 'strange', 'colourful' and 'regular' are all adjectives (that modify nouns), so 'clearly', 'truly', 'strangely', 'colourfully' and 'regularly' are adverbs.

When I say that an adjective modifies a noun, I mean that you can speak of 'clear glass' or say that 'the information is true'. In those examples, 'glass' and 'information' are nouns, and we are using the adjective 'clear' to describe the glass, and the adjective 'true' to say something about 'information'.

Here are a few examples where the adjectives are in red and the nouns they modify are blue:

• I live next door to a Russian family.
• That restaurant is so expensive!
• We just threw out an ugly, old, black-and-white television.
• Crime is a daily event in this city.
• The doors of the house are wooden.

Adverbs, on the other hand, do not modify nouns. Everybody can immediately tell you that they modify verbs, but that's only one thing they do. In brief, they can modify verbs, adjectives or even other adverbs. They can do other things, but that's all we want to look at today. Let's look at a few examples of each of those types, where the adverb is red and the thing it's modifying is in blue:

• He drives too slowly. (modifying a verb)
• The professor at the university spoke eloquently and lucidly. (modifying a verb)
• I've nearly finished the assignment! (modifying a verb)
• The old man stepped very carefully through the bedroom to avoid waking his wife. (modifying a verb)
• The restaurant served disgustingly salty food. (modifying an adjective)
• I think you're completely insane! (modifying an adjective)
• The tank is nearly empty. (modifying an adjective)
• She talks annoyingly loudly. (modifying another adverb)
• Our office operates entirely independently of the main office. (modifying another adverb)
• The train goes unbelievably fast. (modifying another adverb)

One other use of adverbs, to modify whole sentences, is a subject for a different lesson. You can see above how in each case the adverb describes, explains or in some way answers a 'how?' question about the word in blue, whether that is a verb, an adjective or an adverb.

Exercise:

In each of these sentences, choose whether to put '-ly' into the blank (thus making the adjective into an adverb) or to leave it blank (thus keeping it an adjective).

1. The room is awful__ crowded__.
2. These days, I frequent__ spend evenings at home, listening to slow__ music and silent__ reading old__ books.
3. I've grown tired__ of waiting pointless__ for the boss to arrive!
4. You should be extreme__ cautious__ if you see a wild__ animal.
5. I've been working over__ careful__ to avoid making a serious__ mistake.
6. Dinner was nauseating__ rich__.