984: Submodifiers Aug 19, 2017

In general, English allows for flexibility when it comes to the part of speech of a given word. The word 'paint' for example can be a noun, a verb, or an adjective such as in "they paint a scene with red paint, but it left an unpleasant paint smell". Additionally, an ad for the company Hulu read "come TV with us", using a well-established noun as a verb in a way that is still understandable to a native English speaker. Nevertheless, some words do not have such flexibility. In addition to other parts of speech such as determiners or conjunctions that cannot be used as other lexical classes, not even all kinds of adverbs can be used in the same ways as each other. There are several types of adverbs that linguists identify, but submodifiers—the group that refers to adverbs that modify only adjectives and adverbs such as 'very' or 'quite'—can not only not be used as other parts of speech, but cannot even substitute for any given adverb. It should be noted that not everything in other classes like nouns is interchangeable, for example 'milk' which cannot be quantified with numbers or the word 'a' (except when referring to types of milk) cannot substitute for a noun that can, like 'book'; nevertheless, there is still more flexibility here, generally.