Peculiarities of Adverb Placement in English Sentences (exemplified by the adverb "fairly")

The article deals with the problem of adverb placement in English sentences. The paper aims at studying the main tendencies and patterns which influence the choice of the syntactic position of adverbs in English. Special attention is paid to the correlation between the semantic and syntactic features of adverbs. The article also describes possible syntactic positions of adverbs belonging to different semantic classes and the factors which determine the change of the place of the adverb in the sentence. The paper also considers the peculiarities of functioning of adverbs in the sentence based on the analysis of the adverb "fairly". The material for study includes contexts of use of the adverb "fairly" taken from the British National Corpus (BNC). The research uses the following methods: descriptive and statistical methods, methods of contextual analysis and syntactic analysis. The relevance of the subject of the research is due to the fact that in modern English adverbs are characterized by a high level of variability in syntactic placement, and even adverbs belonging to the same semantic class may have different syntactic properties. The analysis showed that "fairly" can be used as an intensifying adverb, an emphasizer, an adverb of manner, an evaluation adverb; in a number of cases it can also acquire additional modal meanings or serve as a speech act-related adverb. Each meaning of the adverb is characterised by its specific variants of syntactic positioning: before the word it modifies, in medial position, in end position and as a parenthetic word detached from the rest of the sentence. The results of the research show the necessity to study the syntactic properties of adverbs in more detail and to clarify their existing dictionary definitions.

adverb, semantic class, intensifying adverb, adverb of manner, evaluation adverb, speech act-related adverb, parenthesis, initial position, medial position, end position