- [Voiceover] Hello grammarians.
Today we are going to talk,
skillfully and patiently,
about adverbs.
And what it is that adverbs do.
And in order to do that, I think it might be
useful to talk about what adjectives do first.
So adjectives can modify stuff.
And I should have been clearer
in the last video,
and said that the stuff they modify is nouns.
But, I didn't wanna introduce too many rules
and strictures.
What adjectives modify is nouns,
and only nouns.
Adverbs modify everything else.
So adverbs modify everything
that's not a noun.
And the way we usually see this applied, is with verbs,
and it's right there in the name too.
Ad-Verbs.
And this comes from
the Latin meaning on or to
verbs, action words.
Adverbs are words that you slap on to verbs,
basically.
What I imagine when I think of adverbs,
is I kind of see like a sticker.
Here's the sticker we've got we can say
"slowly".
So we can take this thing
and turn it into a sticker.
Move it around, do what we like.
So, we can write a sentence like
Greyson ran
slowly.
And slowly here, refers back to ran.
It's how he ran.
It's not really describing
Greyson.
It's modifying or describing
the action of running.
Pearl arranged the furniture
slowly.
Little sticker that we just, poof, put on there.
But a word is also considered an adverb,
if it modifies an adjective.
So let's say adverbs
modify verbs
and adjectives.
So we could say something like,
"Vanessa
was
very hungry".
Right, because hungry is an adjective,
and very, is doing this thing,
where it's modifying hungry.
It's not Vanessa wasn't very.
You can't be very; very is not an adjective.
But it is a modifier, and the word that it's modifying,
is hungry.
How hungry was Vanessa?
Vanessa was very hungry.
Vanessa could also be, slightly hungry.
And this leads me to one of the most
important things about adverbs.
Which is that generally,
they tend to have ly
on them.
So generally the way to make an adverb,
is to just take an adjective,
and add ly to it.
So you take the word slow,
you add ly
you get the adverb slowly.
You take the word nice,
you add ly,
you get the adverb nicely.
If you take the adjective cheerful,
add an ly,
you get the adverb cheerfully.
So adverbs modify everything that isn't a noun.
And that means that they modify verbs,
and adjectives.
The way you make an adverb most of the time,
is by taking an adjective and tacking on ly
to the end of it.
It's like a sticker, that you, poof,
put on top of a verb or an adjective.
That's what adverbs are, and that's what they do.
And what you can do,
is learn anything.
David out.