Let’s consider again how some of the most common verbs we use work grammatically. In a recent post (Well, Good), we saw that one class of verbs identify their subject with an adjective. Such a verb is called a copula (the word means a rope or link in Latin), and they are very common indeed. The most familiar copula is the verb to be (I am happy, we were surprised), but there are many others: that tasted good, it looked fine, that bell sounds loud. But what does it really mean to identify a subject with an adjective, and why can’t we use an adverb instead: that bell sounds loudly?
An adjective is the name of a quality, a distinctive feature of some kind which a noun is understood to possess. We speak of a sturdy table, and the adjective sturdy means that some portion of the quality of sturdiness (the noun form of the adjective) is a part of the table we are referring to. We can change the degree of the adjective (a very sturdy table, where very is an adverb), and when an adjective precedes its noun like that, it intends to name an attribute, an essential and therefore inseparable quality of the noun to which it is attached. The derivation of the term adjective is instructive in this regard. It means in Latin thrown at or attached to, the notion being that a noun names the existence of an entity (concrete or abstract), and its adjective, if there is one denoted, names one of the qualities which has attached itself to, and therefore now defines, the noun named. When an adjective is placed before its noun, we are to understand that the quality it names cannot be separated from that entity as it is being conceived and defined for a particular purpose in a particular sentence.
Adjectives modify (which means change the way we conceive) a noun, but an adverb modifies a verb (and also an adjective or another adverb). Stylistically it is important to use both adjectives and adverbs judiciously; if instead we write them gratuitously, our language swells and only its mass, not its intelligibility, increases. Grammatically, however, a choice is often possible between an adjective and adverb with the same verb, but which one we choose will change what it is we’re saying. This is why precision is held to be the standard we should aspire to in composing expository prose, whose purpose is to name and explain. Poetry, by contrast, is meant more to evoke and suggest, because its realities are thought, at least as understood classically, to abide elsewhere than in the explicatory world of space and time.
So, for example, in a sentence such as that bell sounds loud, the adjective loud is correct (which means here conceptually load-bearing and structurally crucial) because the intention of the sentence is to name a quality of the subject that bell. The verb of this clause, sounds, is a copula, which is identifying the bell with one of its qualities, loudness. The bell certainly has other qualities (large, bronze, historic), but the writer of the clause that bell sounds loud has selected only the one which is most pertinently involved in the meaning he has wished to convey for the circumstances in which he is writing. In the physics of language, so to speak, a portion of loudness has attached itself to the entity named bell (called a substantive), and the resulting clause connects those ideas through the verbal notion of sounding (in the verb form sounds), that is, causing or making a sound. No object of the verb is named because loudness (in the adjective form loud) is perceived to be an intrinsic part of the existence of the bell itself.
Now all that may seem to overexplain what is obvious to most speakers of English, but it can help us understand why the corresponding adverb, loudly, changes the assertion entirely and perhaps unwittingly, a constant worry when our standard in writing prose is precision. If adverbs modify verbs, not nouns, then to say that bell sounds loudly is not incorrect, but it is asserting a different conception altogether. By virtue of the fact that the adverb loudly points to the magnitude of the action of sounds, the sentence now has to do with the action, not the state, or quality, of the noun bell. To say that bell sounds loud is to indicate the effect of the action sounds; to say that bell sounds loudly, or better, that bell sounds loudly every evening, is instead to refer the reader’s attention to the action itself. When we do that, what in the first statement is a copula becomes in the second an intransitive, a verb of action with no direct object. In language, identity and action are not the same.
It is all too easy to dismiss this line of argument with the objection that it is immaterially theoretical, or that its distinctions are academic (if not even pedantic), or that to impose such laws of grammar on the speaking and writing public whose members know what they mean to say borders on the imperious. But none of those objections constitutes firm ground. Every organized body of facts, which, like all sciences, is what grammar constitutes, must assemble its parts according to some principle, and the traditional explanation given here a certain class of verbs is one such standard. Objections arise when we forget that the study of language is composed both of a science of grammar and of an artful adaptation of those scientific facts to audience and purpose and circumstance. We must have both.
It was once thought that the answer to zeroing out the ambiguity inherent in natural language, the way we unguardedly speak and write, was mathematical logic, whose special symbols could replicate our ratiocination while removing nebulosity. Outside specialized applications, however, that solution drains off the artful humanity inevitably to be found in the peculiar ways we can compose our sentences to match the undulations—the imaginative engagement—of human experience. The laws of grammar, like the laws of any science, have no interest in curtailing one’s perceptions. On the contrary, they make it possible for one’s own perspective to be articulated and understood, because they constitute a common framework on which all can depend to communicate meaning and on which each can rely to sustain an individual vision. Without that tension of stability and change, we are left with either the chaotic or the totalitarian, and neither of those befits a human being.
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