6

What is the adverb form of event? As an example:

Aggregate these pictures by their semantics: aggregate semantically.

Aggregate these pictures by the events they may belong to: aggregate ________.

What word or phrase can fill in the blank?

EDIT: To provide some context: By event I mean by instance of birthday party/political rally/sports event/tech conference etc. in a large, unstructured collection of photos belonging to one of these.

Improve this question
1
  • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Nov 23, 2016 at 19:50

5 Answers 5

Reset to default
27

Adverbs are over-hyped

It turns out that one can always create an adverbial prepositional phrase using the noun:

Aggregate these pictures by the events they may belong to: aggregate by event.

This way you do not need to create a free-standing adverb. You don’t even need an adjective (like event-based, event-driven, eventful) this way, and the simple noun is just fine.

From Wikipedia:

In linguistics, an adverbial phrase is a group of two or more words operating adverbially, meaning that their syntactic function is to modify a verb, an adjective, or an adverb. Adverbial phrases ("AdvP" in syntactic trees) are phrases that do the work of an adverb in a sentence.

When you need to describe how or when or where or why something takes place, all you need is a constituent that functions adverbially. You don’t need a literal adverb.

The only time you truly need a single word of some particular part of speech is occasionally when writing computer programs. In actual language used by actual humans in actual speech, we combine words into phrases to convey infinitely more than ever can be expressed in a single word alone. And that’s not hyperbole, either.

Improve this answer
5
  • 1
    Great! That's it.
    – haha
    Commented Nov 20, 2016 at 21:00
  • 10
    Don't you mean “Adverbs are over-hypedly”?
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Nov 20, 2016 at 22:05
  • Even in computer programming I have a hard time imagining why you could not use two words. You might need to run them together (removing any space between them), but there are conventions for doing that.
    – David K
    Commented Nov 21, 2016 at 5:54
  • Thanks! Does providing context (in the edit) change anything in your answer? Are you able to suggest another word with a more idiomatic adverb form that conveys the same meaning?
    – Abhijat Biswas
    Commented Nov 21, 2016 at 9:28
  • 2
    You mean that instead of "adverbially", you could have just used "as an adverb"?
    – Kevin
    Commented Nov 21, 2016 at 15:06
6

I think you can use thematic :

  • of, relating to, or consisting of a theme or themes.
  • Aggregate the pictures thematically.

Dictionary.com

Improve this answer
1
  • 3
    That may be too vague for OP’s purposes. There may be many different themes possible. Maybe i’ve got pictures from WWI, WWII and Vietnam, but a possible thematic aggregation could be city, country, or portraits, fighting scenes, hospital scenes, etc.
    – Jim
    Commented Nov 21, 2016 at 0:08
5

If an adverb is to fit the blanks, I suggest situationally or contextually.

  • "by way of situation"
  • "in a contextual manner; with reference to context"

Aggregate them situationally/contextually

Improve this answer
5

In your example, semantics and events they may belong to are characteristics of the pictures. Therefore an adverb that modifies the verb aggregate does not make sense. It reads ok for semantically but that's coincidental and as @FumbleFingers points out, it won't work for other words.

This might be clearer:

Aggregate these pictures by:

  • Their semantics
  • Events they are related to

or, shorter:

Aggregate these pictures by:

  • Semantics
  • Related events

but it's hard to tell without knowing more of the background to what you want to achieve.

Improve this answer
2
  • 2
    I agree with your answer. I would use "per event" or "by event".
    – user140086
    Commented Nov 20, 2016 at 19:52
  • I think event-wise works unless it is un-idiomatic.
    – Abhijat Biswas
    Commented Nov 21, 2016 at 9:25
2

Aggregate timewise.

Definition: With respect to time (https://www.wordnik.com/words/timewise)

Edit: If there are multiple events at the same time, but in different locations,you could aggregate time and themewise, or time and locationwise. (The squiggles under these tell me I'm not in the dictionary any more.)

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .