Why is the word uproariously an adverb?

Answer 1

Good question, actually. Identifying parts of speech is not always as easy as it appears. The biggest tell here is the "ly" on the end. But not all adverbs have an "ly," nor do all words ending in "ly" qualify as adverb, so you need more tests than that. It's a good test, but not 100% reliable, so let's play a bit of devil's advocate. Usually adverbs and adjectives, in particular, are difficult to distinguish because of their position in an "optional" slot in a sentence. That is, they neither fulfill the spot of subject, which is always a noun, nor action, which is always the verb. In other words, you don't need adjectives or adverbs to form a grammatical sentence. In fact, in the imperative form of a sentence, you don't even need a noun or subject because it's implied. "Run," is a perfectly grammatical, one-word sentence. No adverbs, no adjectives, no noun.

Still, we know uproariously is not a noun because it cannot operate as the subject of a sentence. It simply would not make sense. "Uproariously went to the store." Does that make much sense? Not really, unless some parents were a bit too creative (drunk) when they named their child. It similarly does not ever get paired with an article, such as the or a, another indicator that word might be noun.

We are fairly certain it's not a verb because it similarly would not make much sense in the verbs position.

The problem identifying adverbs is that they are very much like adjectives, hence the prefix "ad." To distinguish an adverb, you can run a couple linguistic tests.

1. Can it be made comparative or superlative? Comparative as in adding "er" to the end to distinguish the degree to which an adverb or adjective is, as in "bigger" (an adjective) or "nearer" an adverb.

2. Can it be qualified? That is, can you modify the word with another word we call a qualifier, which are incidentally, as far as I know, adverbs as well. E.g. "Very beautiful" (qualifier + adjective). "Very quickly" (qualifier + adverb).

3. Is it movable? That is, can you move the word around in the sentence without changing the meaning? This is one of the other distinguishers of adverbs and adjectives. E.g. "John suddenly hit the brakes." or "Suddenly, John hit the brakes." or "John hit the brakes suddenly." You typically cannot get this sort of flexibility with an adjective.

4. Does it end in "ly?" "Ly" is a derivational subject, which just means if we put it on the end of certain nouns and adjectives we already know, we can make them adverbs. For adjectives it's easy. Beautiful + ly = beautifully. For nouns such as uproar, we need more. Dogma + atically = dogmatically. Uproar + iously = uproariously. I'm not sure exactly why this is. I'd have to do more research, but I suspect it has to do with the inflection.

So let's apply these tests to uproariously.

1. Yes, uproariously can be made comparative or superlative as "more uproariously" or "most uproariously."

2. Yes, uproariously can be qualified as in "not very uproariously."

3. Yes, uproariously is movable as in "Uproariously, he flipped the table" or "He flipped the table uproariously" or "He uproariously flipped the table."

4. Does it end in ly? All other things being true, if it ends in ly, it's definitely an adverb.

So that's why uproariously is, in fact, an adverb.