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So you have finished writing up your paper? I hope you have examined
it for the presence of disjunctive adverbs. They can be as pernicious as
a virus imported from a borrowed floppy. You have never heard of disjunctive
adverbs? Well, we linguists do tend to give things big names. In this we
are like medical practitioners. What to your GP is a subcutaneous staphylococcal
infection is to you and to me an unpleasant pain in the neck. Let us have
a look at disjunctive adverbs in plain pain-in-the-neck terms.

The traditional job of the adverb in English is to modify the verb;
in modifying the verb it also tells you something about the nature, the
capabilities, the activities of the grammatical subject of that verb. Take,
for example, the simple sentence: ‘The man climbed up the hill.’ Now add
a simple adverb: ‘The man climbed painfully up the hill.’ In addition to
modifying the action of the verb, the adverb ‘painfully’ also adds information
about the man, who is the subject of the sentence. He is tired, or old,
or perhaps injured. One simple adverb transmits the message.

So far, no problems. But problems have been gathering thick and fast
in recent times, as writers and speakers of American English and increasingly
of British English have taken to the extensive use of an adverbial construction
that used to be fairly restricted.

One of the earliest adverbs to enjoy disjunctive status was ‘briefly’.
The traditional usage can be seen in ‘He spoke briefly and to the point’
– where ‘briefly’ modifies the action of the verb and simultaneously conveys
information about the verb’s grammatical subject. Now look at the sentence
‘Briefly, these are some of my main findings’ – here ‘briefly’ does not
modify the verb and it has no relationship to the verb’s subject ‘these’.
What it does is to stand outside the syntax of the sentence (syntactically
‘disjoined’), expressing an opinion or an attitude or offering a comment
from the writer or speaker.

In that second sentence, ‘briefly’ means ‘I, the speaker, know that
I have been allotted only a 10-minute slot in this symposium and I shall
try to offer a brief summary of my findings in the time available.’ The
displaced – or disjunctive – use of ‘briefly’ is a handy shorthand way of
compressing a whole sentence – even a whole attitude into a single word.

After the successful introduction of disjunctive ‘briefly,’ other adverbs
began to follow suit, similarly replacing longer statements. ‘I shall now
introduce a new and not particularly relevant piece of information’ can
be neatly replaced by ‘Incidentally . . . ‘ The question-begging ‘It is
clear that no explanation or demonstration is called for’ can be replaced
by ‘Obviously . . . ‘ ‘I hate to say this about her but it is best that
you should know . . . ‘ can be compressed into one devastating disjunctive
adverb ‘Candidly . . . ‘ Then again, if you feel that you are on shaky ground
you can boost your own (if not your audience’s) faith in your hypothesis
by opening with the disjunctive ‘Surely . . . ‘

The disjunctive adverb does have its uses; it also has its abuses, particularly
if over-employed in writing. Any device which can compress a sentenceful
of meaning into a single word is a good servant but it can be a bad master.
Surprisingly, happily, fortunately, mercifully, obviously, wisely, regretfully,
predictably, sadly, etcetera have their use as signal flags, but increasingly
they have tended to become mere cliche opening formulae. Watch them.

A further development of the disjunctive adverb is its aspectual use,
signalling a generalised point of view (not necessarily that of the author)
– disjunctives like ‘morally,’ ‘politically,’ ‘economically,’ ‘aesthetically,’
‘philosophically’. Use these with caution. They do signal, but too often
only in the vaguest way. It is remarkable how speedily they lose any real
meaning. ‘Morally, politically and economically, it is a matter of urgency
that the British government . . .’ (I did not invent that. It was spoken
in Parliament.) Disjunctive adverbs of this aspectual type can degen-erate
rapidly into windy rhetoric. Some of them are already 100 per cent wind
– people who begin a sentence with ‘Basically . . . (long pause)’ are merely
playing for time. They have not even begun to think of what they will say.

Writing with an excess of disjunctive adverbs has produced in our time
a smart-alick magazine style, which is best avoided in responsible writing.
I offer no prizes for the source of the following rewrite by a disjunctive
subeditor: ‘Initially, God created the heaven and the Earth. Basically,
the Earth was without form, and void. Tragically, darkness was upon the
face of the deep. Reportedly, the Spirit of God moved the face of the waters.
Mercifully, God said ‘Let there be light’ and – predictably – there was
±ô¾±²µ³ó³Ù.’

Instead, I offer two pieces of advice on disjunctive adverbs: First
learn to recognise them and how they operate. Secondly, use them – like
garlic – sparingly.

Ian Gordon is emeritus professor in English at the University of Wellington,
New Zealand