Appendix talk:Swedish adverbs

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SAG stance on adverbs[edit]

The Swedish Academy Grammar (SAG), which is the first thorough description of the grammar of Swedish from inside Swedish, has modified the understanding of adverbs in Swedish to not include forms such as snabbt, dåligt etc, i.e., what traditional school grammar taught was adverbs derived from adjective through the addition of a final -t.

Instead they treat these words as adjectives, enlarging the possible uses of adjectives in the neuter form (that is with a final -t) to allow them to work as adverbials.

Upon learning this I was initially hesitant, since I also was brought up in the firm conviction that these were adverbs, but the more I understand the advantages of this reanalysis the more convinced I get that this analysis more accurately captures what is going on in Swedish.

The removal of these words from the category adverbs allows them to define adverbs in Swedish to be a closed group of static (no inflections) words. It allows them to do away with the rather awkward "fact" that some adverbs (those claimed to be derived from adjective by the help of -t) can be compared as adjectives, and oops, all the adverbial forms are identical with the adjectival forms; requiring a double specification of f ex snabbare as both comparative of snabb and comparative of snabbt. And the same has to be repeated for each and every adjective.

According to SAG (or rather I have the information from the "popular short version" of it; Svenska akademins språklära) the reason for the original analysis was fetched not from Swedish but from Latin. Latin has a separate form of adjectives when used as adverbials, and then Swedish "should" have one too. This was of course reinforced by the fact that other familiar languages such as English also have a separate form of adjectives (created by adding -ly). But to put it simply, there is no internal evidence in Swedish for treating words such as snabbt as adverbs derived from adjectives, they are simply adjectival forms being used as adverbials.

So where do I want to get with this long rant? Well, quite simply that I think that we should follow the Swedish Academy's stance on this matter, and not treat snabbt, dåligt etc as adverbs, but simply as adjectives.--sanna 21:23, 10 July 2006 (UTC)