14 adultocentric

linguistic area. Adstratal features contrast with those found in the substratum
and superstratum, where a single language has been influenced by some other,
thus further differentiating it from neighbouring languages.

adultocentric (adj.) see adultomorphic

adultomorphic (adj.) A label sometimes used in language acquisition studies,

especially in the 1970s, to characterize an analysis of childrens speech in terms
which were originally devised for the study of the adult language; also called
adultomorphic. Examples include referring to allgone as an elliptical sen-
tence, or describing babbling using the international phonetic alphabet. It
is, of course, difficult to devise a terminology or notation for child speech
which is largely or totally free of adult values, but, it is argued, caution is none
the less needed to avoid introducing too many adult assumptions, and as a
consequence attributing to children a knowledge of language which they do
not possess.

advanced tongue root see root (2)

advancement (n.) A term used in relational grammar for a class of relation-

changing processes. A noun phrase which bears a particular grammatical
relation to some verb comes to bear another grammatical relation to that verb,
higher up the relational hierarchy, e.g. a process converting an object to a
subject. See also promotion (1).

adverb (n.) (A, adv, ADV) A term used in the grammatical classification of
words to refer to a heterogeneous group of items whose most frequent function
is to specify the mode of action of the verb. In English, many (by no means all)
adverbs are signalled by the use of the -ly ending, e.g. quickly, but cf. soon.
syntactically, one can relate adverbs to such questions as how, where, when
and why, and classify them accordingly, as adverbs of manner, place, time,
etc.; but as soon as this is done the functional equivalence of adverbs, adverb
phrases, prepositional phrases, noun phrases, and adverb clauses becomes
apparent, e.g. A: When is she going? B: Now/Very soon/In five minutes/Next
week/When the bell rings. An adverb phrase (often abbreviated as AdvP) is a
phrase with an adverb as its head, e.g. very slowly, quite soon. The term
adverbial is widely used as a general term which subsumes all five categories.
Adverb is thus a word-class (along with noun, adjective, etc.), whereas
adverbial is an element of clause structure (along with subject, object,
etc.), and the two usages need to be kept clearly distinct. Within adverbials,
many syntactic roles have been identified, of which verb modification
has traditionally been seen as central. A function of adverbials as sentence
modifiers or sentence connectors has been emphasized in linguistic studies,
e.g. However/Moreover/Actually/Frankly . . . I think she was right. Several other
classes of items, very different in distribution and function, have also been
brought under the heading of adverb(ial), such as intensifiers (e.g. very,
awfully) and negative particles (e.g. not); but often linguistic studies set these
up as distinct word-classes. See also manner adverb(ial), quantifier, rel-
ative (1).