A locative adverb is a type of

adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering ...

that refers to a location or to a combination of a location and a relation to that location. Generally, a locative adverb is semantically equivalent to a prepositional phrase involving a locative or directional preposition. In English, for example, ''homeward'' is a locative adverb, specifying a location "home" and a relation "toward" (in this case a direction), and is equivalent to the phrase "toward home". The relation need not be a direction, as it can be any relation that can be specified by a locational preposition such as ''to'', ''from'', ''in'', ''at'', ''near'', ''toward'', or ''away from''. For example, the word ''home'' is itself a locative adverb in a sentence like "I took him home today" or "I found him home today"; in the former case, it is equivalent to the phrase "to home", and in the latter to the phrase "at home".

Pro-form In linguistics, a pro-form is a type of function word or expression that stands in for (expresses the same content as) another word, phrase, clause or sentence where the meaning is recoverable from the context. They are used either to avoid re ...

locative adverbs generally form a

closed class In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assi ...

and are particularly important in a language. Examples in English include ''there'' (meaning "at that place"), ''whither'' (= "to what place"), and ''hence'' (= "from this place"). As can be seen from the examples below, these anaphoric locative adverbs generally have a close relationship with the

demonstrative Demonstratives (abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic; their meaning depending on a particular frame ...

s (in English, ''this'' and ''that''). They are also usually closely related to locative

interrogative adverb An interrogative word or question word is a function word used to ask a question, such as ''what, which'', ''when'', ''where'', ''who, whom, whose'', ''why'', ''whether'' and ''how''. They are sometimes called wh-words, because in English most o ...

s; in English, there is (or, at least, once was) a formal relationship between "where/there/here", "whither/thither/hither", and "whence/thence/hence".

References

{{lexical categories Adverbs by type

See also

References