adverbs_relative.md

Cheatsheet: build a sentence

We cannot separate the content of a sentence from its form, its meaning, its style

For travelers: “Pay attention to the punches, and the pounds take care of themselves”

For writers: “Pay attention to the sentences, and most other writing problems take care of themselves”

Proposition

  • What is the proposition?

  • Disputed? Fact?

  • Assert as established fact?

Information flow and focus

  • Theme, topic, subject, details, fronting (see craft)

  • Incremental interpretation (see reasoning)

  • In English, redundant info is often ungrammatical. Spot multiple elements that express the same meaning

  • Construction, verb form, clauses, phrases etc should serve the correct focus of the sentence. Same proposition can have multiple viewpoints or focus.

  • Aspect first. Then timeline, then modality, then tense.

  • Exclusion from the “Here, now and fact”

Main point and peripheral Info

*Mindset of all the distinct pieces of information in the sentence *Don’t cram too much *Consider what you can do without

Deixis: Required context to interpret correctly

  • Personal (I, you, we)

  • Spatial (here, there, this, that)

  • Temporal (now, then, today, yesterday)

  • What is relative to what

  • Timeline, what situation relates to what event

  • Deictic/Non-deictic

Interpretation

What do I want the reader to know before they evaluate this claim?

  • Its certainty? → modal auxiliary or stance adverb.

  • My degree of commitment? → stance verb.

  • Its evidential basis? → suggest, evidence, apparently.

  • Its logical status? → therefore, however, although.

  • Its evaluation? → It is likely…, It is surprising…, actually, clearly.

  • Avoid cumbersome narration of catenative chains

Accurate Meaning

  • Grammatical Meaning

  • Lexical Meaning

  • Grammatical signals

Readers and value

Clear, concise, comprehensible, sentences that mean something to them.

“What’s important to my Reader?” not just, “What will get his attention”. The answer, the value, becomes the main point of the sentence

English usage preference

  • Keep related words together.

  • Put light before heavy.

  • Put given information before new information.

  • Express each meaning only once.

  • Let context do the work when grammar doesn’t need to.

  • Prefer compact constructions.

Adverbial

  • Legit way to modify the target constiteuent

  • Add info that does not derived from the modified itself

  • Seek first for specific verb that conveys the meaning directly

Auxiliary verbs

  • Tense → When?

  • Aspect → How does the event unfold in time?

  • Voice → Who is presented as the subject?

  • Modality → What is the speaker’s stance toward the proposition (possibility, necessity, prediction, obligation, etc.)?

  • For future “if” conditional, bare present subordinate presents a relationship as a law, a general fact; “will” presents it as a prediction about the future (maybe weaker)

Clause type by grammatical form

  • Declarative

  • Imperative

  • Interrogative

  • Exclamative

Coordination: Fill in the blanks

Spot where the reader has to fill in the coordination blanks. Find relations instead of never ending “and” which is tiering (“and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”). Relations however put cognitive load

Finiteness

Most declarative sentences should have a clearly identifiable finite clause carrying the main assertion. Finite clause that advances the discourse, while non-finite clauses package supporting information.

  • Finite clause: Main assertion; highest discourse prominence

  • To-infinitival: Projected or intended event | Gerund-participial | Activity or process viewed as an entity or circumstance | | Past-participial | State or result used descriptively | | Bare infinitival | Event integrated into another verbal construction | | Verbless | Contextual frame with minimal independent prominence |

Bare infinitivals are not a general-purpose non-finite form. They occur mainly after a restricted set of licensers.

Compared with bare infinitivals, to-infinitivals are much more flexible and often give the action a more conceptual, potential, or future-oriented character.

Infinitive phrases

  • Intention, goals

  • Purpose

  • Potential

  • Ideas as object (the decision to…)

  • Also can reduce clauses

Irrealis realization

  • Preterite → remoteness

  • Modal auxiliary → modal nuance

  • Lexical semantics → mood-like nuance

  • Perfect → past orientation (often yielding past counterfactuals)

  • Aspect → temporal structure

  • Be / been → state, location, passive, or progressive situation type

Modality

  • Auxiliaries modality projects assertion, the writer’s stance

  • Modal auxiliaries (must, can, should, will, might) are better whenever you need speed, raw rhetorical punch, lightness, or direct moral conviction.

  • Modal auxiliaries are your primary tool for ignition and energy.

  • Lexical modals build authority and evidence-anchored precision, overusing them can make prose feel dry, clinical, and bloated.

  • Lexical verbs modalities (seems, managed, demands etc) project observation, the world’s mechanics

  • Lexical verbs modality present a possibility/necessity as part of the situation. Compact and neutral.

  • Lexical verbs modality emphasises the reasoning, evidence, or source behind the conclusion.

  • Lexical verbs modality is expressed as a relationship between evidence/source and the proposition.

  • For punchy, simple sentences use an auxiliary

  • Modal adjunct explicitly calibrate your confidence as a writer.

  • Modal adjunct let the speaker explicitly grades the likelihood of the proposition.

  • Modal adjunct: Modality is expressed as the speaker’s assessment of the proposition.

  • Modals present an action not as something negotiated with the outside world, but as an inherent truth.

Modifiers/Adjuncts

  • Attached to the correct element of the sentence

  • English works by incremental interpretation, which means qualification as the sentence advances. Verify you add the modifiers as the sentence advances to pinpoint the specific semantic idea.

  • Incremental qualification, adjuncts types and their semantic relations to their targets (see reasoning)

Phrases

Look for the headword

Prepositions

  • Make relationships more specific between and among sentence parts,

  • Establish points of reference for readers, like road signs on a highway.

  • See the writers option. How, why, when, where, and indicate such adverbial concepts as manner, reason, likeness, and condition

  • Substitutes clause can be more concise

  • Clarify (substitute coordination)

  • Pairs imply balanced opposites or complete coverage of a subject (from..to)

  • Strengthen a series relationship (with x, with y, with z)

  • Heighten relationship between sentences

  • “The writers options” suggests to think about prepositional phrases and infinitive phrases together, same class of options

When you tell about your job at the Taco Bell near the mall outside of town, argue for or against prayer in public school, brag that your new computer can play chess like a master, or explain how scientists turn saltwater into fuel by a new chemical process—you’re using prepositions.

Relative Clauses

  • An adjective with a subject and a word

  • Headed by a relative pronoun

  • Tells us something about the antecedent

  • Squeeze information from sentences into an adjective. Good - but when fits

Select tense

  • What will happen? >> Future, I will…

  • What will already be true at a future point (state)? >> Future perfect, I will have …

Stance

Choose the weakest stance that accurately reflects your evidence, and keep the focus on the claim rather than on yourself unless your personal judgement is the point.

  • Express possibility or uncertainty → use modal auxiliaries (may, might, could) or stance adverbs (probably, possibly).

  • Present an inference → use stance verbs (suggest, seem, appear) or stance adverbs (apparently).

  • Express confidence → use stance adverbs (clearly, certainly) or stance adjectives (It is clear that…).

  • Correct an expectation → use stance adverbs (actually, in fact).

  • Express personal judgement → use stance verbs (I think, I believe).

  • For modality, auxiliaries are better for stance then lexical verbs that carry modality semantics

By grammatical option:

  • May / might / probably — default for claims that go beyond the evidence.

  • Suggest / appear / seem — when drawing an inference from data, examples, or reports.

  • Clearly / certainly — only when the evidence is overwhelming or the point is genuinely uncontested.

  • Actually / in fact — when correcting a likely assumption or contrasting with what was just said.

  • I think / I believe — mainly in personal or opinion pieces; avoid repeating them in academic prose.

Tense & aspect

  • Tense answers: When? Locates the situation on a linear timeline

  • Aspect answers: How the situation is viewed internally (completed, ongoing, etc.)

  • Primary and secondary tense

Tensed clauses

  • Tensed matrix clause → “This is what I am asserting.”

  • Tensed subordinate clause → “This is another situation relevant to my assertion.”

  • Tenseless subordinate clause → “This is supporting material integrated into my assertion.”

Timeline

  • Associate time elements with specific action

  • The verb should locate on time, on timeline

  • Primary anchor (absolute), secondary anchor (relative)

  • Speaker or non speaker point of view (deictic)

  • Decoupling the primary and secondary tenses allows for precise epistemic distancing

Verb

  • Finite/infinite

  • Tense

  • Perfective/imperfective

  • Progressive/non progressive (duration/punctual, static or state)

  • Open/remote

  • Stative/Dynamic

  • Form, syntax, context

Sentence construction choices

  • Info package (see CGEL)

  • Inverted

  • Complex (one or more subordinates)

  • Subordinate - for what?

  • Parenthetical attribution

  • Canonical or non-canonical?

  • Affirmative (positive declarative)?

  • Conditional

English driven reasoning patterns

  • Inference

  • Evidence Attribution

  • Qualification

  • Distinction

  • Definition

  • Reframing

  • Analytical Decomposition

  • Counterargument & Concession

  • Evaluation

  • Generalization

Concise

  • Omit words already mentioned earlier in the paragraph/sentence (unless repetition intended)

  • Omit needless words

  • Gerund, verbal nouns

  • Noun substitutions

  • Can repeat only relevant part of the subject

Some lawyers are arrogant, some simply reserved. (Only “some” is repeated)

ESL (Zinisser)

  • Short is better than long.

  • Simple is good. (Louder)

  • Long Latin nouns are the enemy.

  • Anglo-Saxon active verbs are your best friend.

  • One thought per sentence.