A11. Most of our readers consider that English grammar is not so difficult to
handle; all you have to do is, search for a few good grammar sites on the Internet, and you solve, quickly and for free, all
grammatical problems you may encounter. Well, it doesn't work that way, dear readers. The Internet is a . . . it is full of stupid, trivial "things". You
will never find true knowledge for free on the Internet. The only good thing about the Internet is, it helps us discover the books
and the documents we need. Further from there, you have to pay--we all do that.
Another problem is the "spelling tools" we use. Dear readers, any grammar check software will work in 90% of all instances--this is,
regardless of how good a grammar check software tool is, or could be. The rest of 10% are incorrect instances, because they are
based on interpreting the "meaning": no software tool will ever manage to understand the English meaning appropriately. Therefore,
great caution is strongly recommended when you rely only on software to correct your messages.
The question above may appear simple, but it is rather complex. It would take us one hour of studying LSEG4,
and then another hour to write the appropriate answer. Yes, we do study LSEG4 for correct answers, just as
anybody else, because English grammar is no joke. Therefore, our answer to V.S. was fairly brief and abrupt, as follows.
The first thing we do when we perform a grammatical analysis is, we look at the meaning of the
words, and sentences. The "meaning" is the first and the most important reference in English grammar. Following, we use
Morphology, and then Sentence Syntax, to finalize our investigations.
Now, it is of capital importance to highlight that the English adverbs take two forms:
1. adjectival (easy, sure, cold, hard, slow)
2. adverbial (easily, surely, coldly, hardly, slowly)
However, not all adverbs have both forms: some have only one form, either the adjectival or the adverbial one. Please be very careful when using
adverbs, because there are adjectives and even nouns having exactly the same forms as the adverbs do.
The second thing you need to know about adverbs is, there are a few very important rules
regarding two consecutive adverbs: one of them has to be in the adjectival form. Please study LSEG4
for details and examples.
 The third important aspect is, not all adverbs form "degrees of comparison". In addition, there
are adverbs that have the "superlative" already embedded into their meaning, therefore they do not form, again, degrees of
comparison. Note that using the English adverb correctly is a tough issue. There are very many well-known authors, having tens of
books published, which do not use the adverb correctly.
The fourth important aspect is, the adverbs form their comparison degrees according to the
following rules:
1. synthetic comparison (or the Saxon one) for monosyllable adverbs plus "early";
2.
analytic comparison (or the French/Norman one) for polysyllable adverbs.
In LSEG4 are presented about ten groups/categories of exceptions to the above rules. As a note, LSEG4 has
been specifically "designed" to be easily understood. That means, all grammatical mechanisms presented are the essence of
simplicity, right to the point.
The last difficult aspect, related to using adverbs, is about their position within the sentence
structure. Again, the best thing is to study LSEG4. In addition, LSEG4 explains
all orthographical changes after adding specific endings to nouns [the "-s" of the plural], to adjectives [the "-er" and "-est"], to
adverbs [the "-er", "-est", and "-ly"] and to verbs [the "-ing" form].
As you can see this topic is indeed complex; therefore, our advice to V.S., and to you, is buy LSEG4 and
study it for a couple of years. After that, you are going to be an expert in English grammar.
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