ADJUNCTS

Adjuncts are (groups of) words that give additional information about functionaries (subject, object, predicate etc.) of the sentence. Example: My brother John already knows all the tricks of book commerce. The skeleton sentence is: John knows the tricks, the rest are adjuncts (although one might argue about the primacy of tricks over commerce).

Basically there are three kinds of adjunct:

1) Attributive adjuncts give information that is irrelevant to the informative purpose of the sentence. In My brother John knows all about fishing, the fact that John is my brother (or that my brother’s name is John) has hardly any bearing on his competence in fishing.

2) The information in predicative adjuncts is somehow instrumental to the informative purpose of the sentence. The famous rock singer had his young public rolling in the aisles. The singer’s being famous and also his public being young contribute to the enthusiasm.

3) Appositions are set a little apart from the rest and  contain  information relevant or irrelevant to the issue of the sentence: Thucydides, a dismissed commander of the Athenian army, wrote a history of the Peloponnesian war. The bit between the comma’s is just additional information, but his having been a commander may have a bearing on the quality, and even the existence, of this work.

In Attic and other Greek prose, and even in poetry, there is a different treatment of attributive and predicative adjuncts: attributive adjuncts are placedadjacent to the word they determine; if that word is accompanied by an article, the attribute is placed between the article and the determined word, or else immediately after it and accompanied by a repeated article:

Ὁ Αἰγύπτιος δοῦλος  τὰ αὐτὰ ἐργάζεται τῷ Λυδίῳ = Ὁ δοῦλος ὁ Αἰγύπτιος τὰ αὐτὰ ἐργάζεται τῷ Λυδίῳ. The  Egyptian slave does the same work as the Lydian one.

If the determining word is not so placed it is meant to be a predicative adjunct: Ὁ δοῦλος Αἰγύπτιος πλέονα ἐργάζεται ἢ ὁ Λύδιος = Αἰγύπτιος ὁ δοῦλος πλέονα ἐργάζεται ἢ ὁ Λύδιος: The slave, (being) Egyptian, does more work than the Lydian one.

All this also goes for adjuncts to words in other cases.

If the determined word is not accompanied by the article, the author will tend to mark predicative adjuncts by placing them not immediately adjacent to the word they determine.

[If an author judges the possibility of misinterpretation negligible, these rules may be forgotten.]

Appositions are treated in the same way as in English: they are set apart by placing comma’s.

N.B. Adjuncts may take quite different forms from those treated above: Genitives, prepositional groups, relative and other secondary clauses and adverbs, may equally well have the function of adjuncts. The rules stated above also apply to Genitives and prepositonal groups.

For further information see Article.