nonadverb

Nonadverb is a term used in some linguistic descriptions to refer to any word that is not an adverb. It is not a standard or widely standardized part-of-speech category in most traditional grammars, but it can appear in descriptive grammar or computational tagging as a catch-all label for non-adverb items.

In practice, nonadverbs encompass the broad range of lexical and functional categories other than adverbs. This can include adjectives, nouns, verbs, pronouns, numerals, determiners, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections, and particles, among others. The exact set of words considered nonadverbs depends on the grammar or tagging scheme in use. When a word functions as something other than an adverb in a given context, it may be treated as a nonadverb in analyses that distinguish adverbial from non-adverbial usage.

A word may be both an adverb in one sense and belong to another category in another context (for example, some words that can function as adjectives or adverbs). In such cases, classification hinges on actual syntactic function rather than a fixed lexical label. Consequently, the term nonadverb is mainly a diagnostic or computational aid rather than a formal, universally adopted part-of-speech tag.

Because many grammars do not employ a separate nonadverb category, the label is primarily used in corpus linguistics, language processing, or education to emphasize the contrast with adverbs. Understanding nonadverbs depends on the specific tagging scheme and the syntactic function of the word in a sentence.