The position of adverbs
Reminded myself of the flexibility of adverb placement in English sentences by this Reddit comment I saw.
For many cases the placement of adverbs does not change the meaning of a sentence (as demonstrated by these two pages of Taggart & Wine’s My Grammar and I).
However, what’s intriguing here is that that sentence seems to be an exception of that, in which case we are focusing on the part “The position isn’t just great.”
Let’s see how the meaning changes when the adverb “just” is placed in each of the grammatical positions in the sentence:
- Just, the position is not great. - 只是，那擺位不行啊。
- The position just is not great. - 那擺位真是不行啊。
- The position is just not great. - 那擺位是真不行啊。
- The position is not just great. - 那擺位不只是不錯呢。
- The position is not great, just. - 那擺位不行，剛好不行。
Interestingly, 2. and 3. mean the same in the sense that the badness of the position is emphasised the word “just”, but for 1., 4. and 5., the meaning changes:
1.seems to suggest a contrasting idea, …5.suggests that the degree of badness is right at the border of the standard, whereas, perhaps surprisingly, …4.which is exactly the form that the original comment is in, actually gives the exact opposite meaning (i.e. the position is more than good) to perhaps what the commenter really intends to (i.e. the position is bad).
An example of the importance of word order in the English language, I guess.