On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 9:14 PM, bob therriault <[email protected]> wrote:
> You'r right, we're really talking about two parts of speech
> (nouns and verbs), the third part of speech would be modifying
> other adverbs and this is really a case of modifying a verb
> (which is in this case an adverb-verb combination).

Do you mean something like +//. where you use two
adverbs to modify a verb?  First one adverb modifies the
verb and you get a derived verb.  Then the second adverb
modifies the derived verb?

> I am starting to think of adverbs as a kind of preprocessor for a verb by 
> changing the way arguments are parsed/adjusted prior to use. This may be a 
> flawed view :)

This is a viable view, for both adverbs and conjunctions.

That said, they have the full power of J available to
them (which makes them a bit different from the sort
of preprocessor you might encounter in other languages).

>> Of course, the verb itself can be used in a monadic verb
>> context or a dyadic verb context.  But that context is largely
>> independent of the adverb.
>
> Hmmm. I think by this you mean the monadic or dyadic versions of the 
> verb-adverb complex (which is a verb itself). In that case, whether the 
> verb-adverb is monadic or dyadic is certainly independent of the adverb and 
> only depends on the number of arguments. If you are referring only to the 
> verb being modified by the adverb, in the case of ~ and / the verb is always 
> acting with two arguments. There may be cases where the modified verb does 
> change from monadic to dyadic depending on the number of arguments of the 
> verb-adverb complex, but as I am still muddling through the language I 
> haven't seen that behaviour yet.

They can only be different in different containing sentences.

-- 
Raul
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