Do You Feel Different or Differently?

Well, that depends. And what it depends upon can help us both to review a point of grammar and to sharpen our critical thinking.

We use words to represent our mentality, our state of mind, about a given circumstance. We might be in the very situation about which we are constructing sentences, or we might be depicting a moment in the past or projecting one into the future, real or imagined. No matter how precise we try to be in our choice of words and arrangement of grammatical elements, however, the truth of the matter is that language is often a rough-hewn attempt to bring a circumstance before the mind of another to consider. One word may mean many things, and we may regard this uncertainty either optimistically as a rich ambiguity, or pessimistically as a hopeless chaos. Let’s go with the former.

In this sentence, for example, what does the verb feel mean: After hearing their side of the story, do you feel different about it now? In analyzing a verb, it is practically very helpful to remember the three classes by which they are categorized: transitive, intransitive, and copulative. A transitive verb always works together with a direct object (I felt the warm sun on my arm); an intransitive verb does not work with a direct object, but represents instead the action itself alone (the blind man felt for the door); and a copulative, or linking, verb identifies the subject with some thing or some quality (she felt cold). We can recognize a copulative verb more readily if we can see that the verb to be is assumed (logically, not stylistically) somewhere in the predicate: she felt herself to be cold.

With that quick review, let’s look again at the sentence: After hearing their side of the story, do you feel different about it now? Does the subject you feel anything directly? There is no direct object, so we cannot classify the verb feel as it is used here as a transitive verb. We can, however, understand that feel in this context means to be conscious of something, to be aware of a quality of difference, or dissimilarity in oneself. The verb feel, therefore, functions in this particular sentence as a copulative verb, and the adjective different names the quality with which the subject you may be identifying itself. The adjective different, in other words, describes the subject you, as it would, for example, in saying I feel sad about it.

But if we now change the adjective different to the adverb differently, how does this alter the meaning of the verb feel: After hearing their side of the story, do you feel differently about it now? Adverbs modify verbs, not nouns or pronouns, so with this change, the writer or speaker has altered the angle of meaning, so to speak, along which we as readers or listeners are to perceive the emphasis, the significant concern, of the statement. Since the adverb differently can only refer to the verb feel, that changes the status of the verb from copulative to intransitive, because there is no longer an adjective in the predicate. That is to say, the question do you feel no longer means what quality are you conscious of being in your own mind, but do you think in a different way about the situation. To feel meaning to think is now an intransitive verb, which must be modified appropriately by the adverb differently, not by the predicate adjective different.

The answer, then, is that both statements are correct, depending upon what one intends to say. As readers and listeners, we must discern the situation and look to other words in the sentence for cues and clues. The prepositional phrase about it, for example, might suggest the copulative interpretation, because to feel about often expects an emotional answer. But that would not be conclusive evidence, and so absent a larger context, we must respect the ambiguity and look closely at what conclusion the grammar supports.

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