Friday, July 20, 2007

Adjunct (grammar)

In linguistics, an adjunct is a sentence element that establishes the circumstances in which the action or state expressed by the verb take place.

The following sentence uses adjuncts of time and place:

Yesterday Lorna saw the dog in the garden.
This definition can be extended to include adjuncts that modify nouns or other parts of speech (see noun adjunct):

The large dog in the garden is very friendly.
Adjuncts are always extranuclear; that is, removing an adjunct leaves a grammatically well-formed sentence. They can thus be contrasted with complements. All adjuncts are adverbials.

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