Subject function

The following notes may be of some importance for all those who teach the subject in the high schools of Syria, and that is why they, to the best of my belief, should be taken into consideration.

There is a mention of the word “adverbial”, which is translated by most teachers as “zarf” i.e. an adverb. We ,teachers, are sometimes not given any clear-cut distinction between an adverb and the word adverbial while discussing the simple sentence pattern (subject verb adverbial). Most of the students, if not all translate the word in question as “zarf”. Maybe this is due to the wrong translation of this word by most teachers. What I would like to say is that there is a big difference between an adverb and an adverbial.

An adverb is a word or phrase that modifies or qualifies another word (esp. an adjective, a verb, or another adverb) or a word-group , expressing a relation of place, time, circumstance, manner, cause, degree,...etc. (e.g. quietly, gently, then, there) so, an adverb is a pre-modifier of another word in phrases whereas an adverbial is a syntactic function that can be realized by so many different structures in sentences. An adverb is a structure or a syntactic category i.e. a grammatical class. In very simple terms, a part of speech. Let’s analyze the following sentences in terms of structure and function:

very strongly.	can blow	1Some winds
adverbial	predicator	subject	Function:
adverb phrase	verb phrase	Noun phrase	Structure:

Also, in sentences (4) and (5), we can never ever say to our students that in in Hama and broken are adverbs, simply because they are not so. They are a prepositional phrase and a past participle functioning as adverbials respectively. An adverbial is a syntactic function and not a syntactic structure. If you insist on translating the word adverbial, you can translate it as Al halia or Al zarfia or Al hal.

Some authors of some textbook give us a good, detailed explanation of the present perfect continuous tense, forgetting intentionally or maybe unintentionally to remind our dear students that such a tense cannot be passivized i.e. it cannot be changed into the passive. That is to say, a sentence like: “He has been eating an apple.” is never used in the passive form. I myself corrected a lot of exam papers containing such intralingual errors. I advise my dear colleagues to draw the attention of their students to this matter in the sense that their students have to be aware of the fact that the present perfect continuous and the past perfect continuous are not to be used in the passive voice.