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There is something right about this, but I tend to think that, rather than modifying either the verb alone or the entire verb phrase, quickly modifies either the verb phrase alone (which specifies an …

No, your example sounds very peculiar, and I think you have hit on the reason why: "fully" and "electrically" are both adverbs of the same type occurring in the same clause. …

English adverbs don't modify verbs (with the possible exception of degree adverbs). … One reasonably well worked out scheme characterizing English adverbs is McCawley's, where clause adverbs are distinguished by the type of constituent they modify. …

I think "entering" should have been followed by a comma: "and thus entering, they occupied every part of the plaza." "Thus entering" is an absolute construction. It has the force of an adverbial sub …

"Run over" is a verb with its own meaning, grammar, and pronunciation. You'll see the difference in pronunciation if you consider: He ran over the grass. which is ambiguous in writing, but not …

The best reference I know is the chapter on adverbs in McCawley's book The Syntactic Phenomena of English. … Here is an interesting paper from 1970 by George Lakoff on the logic of adverbs: Adverbs and modal operators. …

I don't know why "basically" can come between subject and verb phrase, "I basically ate pizza every day", however other performative adverbs can also occur in this position: "I frankly don't give a damn …

On (1), I rely on McCawley's classification of adverbs (see p. 197 and elsewhere in The Syntactic Phenomena of English). …

It's hard to classify. My guess is that "around" is part of the verb "mope around". If it were a preposition, it ought to be okay to say *"Around what did he mope?" or *"the house around which he mo …

The second example has to be read with an intonation break between "still" and "though", which justifies a comma there, since those two words do not form a syntactic constituent. That's my personal o …

There are at least three theories about the syntactic types of adverbs: containing constituent (see Thomason & Stalnaker and also Zeno Vendler), where manner adverbs are taken to be within verb phrases … as direct objects In all three theories, there are other types of adverbs as well, and manner adverbs do not have a special privileged status. …

Adverbs ordinarily precede the adjectives or adverbs they modify, so that is why in your examples "completely" precedes the adjective "expressionless" or the adverb "expressionlessly", which it modifies … But many other adverbs can occur in the two latter positions. The position of adverbs depends on what the adverbs modify, but unfortunately not in any simple way. …

It's not resolved in your first example, which really is ambiguous. Are you asking for some best way to resolve it by rephrasing? Anything that works.

There is nothing wrong with either of the two sentence structures associated with the meanings you're concerned with, so it's grammatically ambiguous. There could be something special about the conte …

If I had to guess at the meaning of "objectively necessary", I suppose I might guess that it meant necessary as a matter of fact. The trouble is, I don't know how to interpret that. The difference b …