Oh, okay, so ‘You can read my ESL story’ is your mantra. How very self-gratifying that must be for you.
Your tie is also very pink. So what?
Perhaps you’d like to stop dragging the thread down with personal remarks and comment on the use of ‘across’ or any of the points about the English language which followed in the discussion.
I don’t think in the following sentence ‘across’ is an adjective: The yard measures about 50 feet across.
If it were, you could say: “How across is the yard”?
TOEIC listening, photographs: At the cash register
I didn’t say it was an adjective.
I said it was an adverb.
So does that dictionary definition.
Bev, how can it be an adverb when you can’t use it either in a question nor as a modifier of an adjective? I mean, that’s what adverbs usually do, don’t they?
TOEIC listening, photographs: Loading the car
It’s used as an expression of measurement - distance from one side to the other.
I’m more inclined to accept what Torsten says of ‘wide’, but I can’t question the correctness of Randolph Quirk eta. However, ‘across’ functions like ‘away’ as in ‘it is two miles away’.
By the way which is correct here - meters/metres?
Bev, how can an adverb be used as an expression of measurement? You can use a noun (3 meters) in connection with an adjective (wide) to talk about measurement. How can you use an adverb to express measurement? You can’t say ‘the river is very widely’, can you? You also can’t say ‘the river is very across’ or the ‘the river is across wide’. So I really don’t think across can function as an adverb. It’s just a preposition or in very few instances an adjective.
TOEIC listening, photographs: A large watermelon
***** NOT A TEACHER *****
Hello, Anglophile:
I believe Americans spell it “meter” and the Brits spell it “metre.”
For example, Americans spell it “theater,” but they occasionally spell it “theatre” when they want to seem sophisticated – like the British!
By the way, may I share something that highly amused me:
“Apart from the impossible-to-change Americans and the foot-dragging British only Liberia and Myanmar still use imperial weights and measures.” – Peter Best in Sydney (London Review of Books print edition of August 29, 2013, page 4).
Most native-born Americans do not understand the metric system and have no interest in doing so.
James
Thank you, James, for your enlightening comment. Of course this forum, to me, often looks like one recommending a blend of both the BrE and AmE in the same context. I find only Alan being consistent with the BrE, particularly in orthography. I am interested more in the former, for we still follow the BrE system here. We often tell the students that though we may know how differently a particular word or a phrase is used in the AmE, we need to adopt only the BrE in formal contexts like an examination or an interview. You will be surprised to learn that we follow the use of he/she, not the most advocated (by this forum) use of ‘they’ which, to us, does not hold water in terms of logic, reason and grammar. Nevertheless I find this forum largely useful when I argue with the unbiased ones. Thanks once again, James.
This is exactly the reason why I hesitated to indicate the function in the first place. However, grammar books state it is an adverb, dictionaries state it is an adverb.
I’m happy that it is an adverb.
Comparing one thing to another is a very weak argument for dismissing it as such. We are all aware that the functions of words change dramatically in different contexts.
Are you saying that you can substitute one for the other there, or do I misunderstand you?
Can you give me another example where a word which usually functions as a preposition becomes an adverb? Also, other than in the given sentence, can you think of any other contexts in which ‘across’ functions as an adverb or is this the only instance?
TOEIC listening, photographs: An outdoor gathering
When a word that is typically a preposition does not have any object following (even when there may be an implied object), I think it is often classified as an adverb.
Did you look at the exemplar sentences that accompanied the dictionary definition?
There are a few more on this page:
***** NOT A TEACHER *****
Good morning, Tortsten:
I have found that the online Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary is a wonderful source for examples.
I thought that these might interest you:
ADVERB
a. The streams are small enough to jump across.
a. The hole was 10 feet across.
i. The dictionary says that this = 10 feet wide.
a. I saw them crossing the street and I waited until they were safely across.
I found this in The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar:
PREPOSITIONAL ADVERB
“A particle, a word identical or closely related to a preposition, but functioning as an adverb.”
The book gives these two examples:
I fell down the stairs. (preposition)
I fell down. (prepositional adverb)
James