My comments are embedded below On 2010-11-22, at 11:23 AM, Roger Hui wrote:
> Well, to be picky about it (and I did not state my case very > well before). > >> The tricky part is that to be truly useful the adverb changes >> its action depending on what part of speech it is modifying >> and how many arguments the resulting entity is processing. > > - Adverbs are not tricky. You're right, I've changed the title to 'Those (not so) Tricky Adverbs ' :) > - Even if you consider them tricky, I doubt that it is the > fact that some adverbs can modify nouns that makes > them tricky. That the same adverb has three different actions depending on the part of speech it modifies seems like a natural language than a computer language (but that might be just my take). In any case, it does introduce an extra level of variation beyond the dyadic/monadic question, so it did seem that the function of having nouns as arguments made adverbs more complex i.e. tricky. > - If the number of arguments makes them tricky, then it > is the idea that the same verb can have a monadic > and a dyadic case that is tricky, not adverbs. > Again, I agree completely that if you just take the cases of adverbs that affect verbs, the situation is pretty straightforward. On the other hand, being able to use adverbs to modify other adverbs and the options Evoke provides are nice features to have in the language, although we might be smart to leave that part of the explanation out for beginners first impressions. Cheers, bob > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
