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Manipulating word classes
A style with lots of adverbs: Our analysis of passage
Analytical comments:
This probably feels like a rather odd piece of writing (your tutors are
not great writers of fiction!).16 of the 61 words are adverbs. This gives
a figure of 26%, about five times the 5.3% of the Ellegard norm for written
English. 9 of the 16 adverbs are manner adverbials, and so this passage
will feel to be mainly about the manner in which the dreadful things happened.
There are also 3 place adverbs and one time adverb, helping to 'fix' the
time and place to some degree. Although most of the adverbs specify matters
in relation to the verbs, there are also sentence adverbs (then, suddenly')
and a couple which modify another adverb ('seemingly inexorably' and an
adjective ('gigantically large').
References
Ellegard, A. (1978) The Syntactic Structure of English Texts: A Computer-based
Study of Four Kinds of Text in the Brown University Corpus, Gothenburg
Studies in English, 43.
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