Category talk:English point-in-time adverbs

RFM discussion: September 2014–December 2020
I think "punctual" is the more common way to describe these? —CodeCat 23:41, 19 September 2014 (UTC)
 * "Temporal adverb" is much, more common, though it may include a more diverse group of adverbs DCDuring TALK 00:19, 20 September 2014 (UTC)
 * I believe that we are making a mistake to treat all of these in subcategories of parts of speech. We can be free of the tyranny of the word classes that users are familiar with for purposes of categories of this kind, though sadly not for headings. There are nominals that are not nouns, MWEs that are not phrases of any kind. Forcing a category structure to be hierarchical is convenient in a bureaucratic kind of way, but it does a great deal of violence to the reality of things. DCDuring TALK 00:27, 20 September 2014 (UTC)
 * There was Category:Latvian temporal adverbs, which I renamed to Category:Latvian time adverbs while also creating Category:English time adverbs. I did this because "temporal" seems like a higher-register word, which is like the distinction between "location" and "locative" - and we already had Category:English location adverbs as noted in the discussion below. So I figured that "time" was a better lexical counterpart to "location" than "temporal". Using "temporal location" is confusing as it gives the impression that these adverbs indicate a place, which they don't of course. But it also misses the point of the category. The defining characteristic is that these refer to punctual moments in time, analogous to adverbs which denote stationary position. They contrast with adverbs like "yearly" or "for a year" which denote frequency and duration respectively. These, of course, are also temporal location adverbs, but they don't belong in this category as they have their own categories (Category:English frequency adverbs and Category:English duration adverbs), so the suggested new name is an attempt to make this more explicit. —CodeCat 21:01, 20 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Note that the other categories both use nouns attributively instead of adjectives, eg, not "frequent adverbs", but "frequency adverbs". The nouns are chosen because they have a different meaning than the adjectives. "Punctuality" obviously doesn't cut it. Can you think of any other one- or two-word nominal that would be better than "temporal location"? DCDuring TALK 14:04, 23 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Oppose. Ain't broke. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:14, 20 September 2014 (UTC)
 * It is, see my reply above. —CodeCat 21:01, 20 September 2014 (UTC)


 * DCDuring is right that "temporal adverbs" is a lot more common than "punctual adverbs". The latter phrase gets only 50 non-redundant raw Google hits, and 47 Google Books hits; the former phrase gets at least 43 pages of Google Books hits (43x10 = 430 hits) before the hits stop actually containing the phrase. "Temporal location adverbs" is the least common of the bunch, getting only 6 Books hits, and it's a moronic / oxymoronic name, because it states that the adverbs refer to places, which they do not. So the question is whether it's sufficient to relabel these as "temporal adverbs", or necessary to give them the narrower label "punctual adverbs"? Are there enough of them that the narrow categorization is necessary? Is the narrow label one people will understand? - -sche (discuss) 22:00, 20 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, as it is now, we have Category:English time adverbs, but it's a parent category to various other types of adverbs with an aspect of time. The adverbs in question here are just one type. So it wouldn't make so much sense to have "temporal adverbs" as a subcategory of "time adverbs". But it also wouldn't make much sense to have "frequency adverbs" as a subcategory of "temporal adverbs" if the latter is meant to indicate points in time specifically. —CodeCat 17:05, 23 September 2014 (UTC)


 * It stays put Kilo Lima Mike (talk) 20:36, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

RFM discussion: August 2021–March 2024
Module:category tree/poscatboiler/data/lemmas already links to "punctual adverbs" but this module does not include "temporal location adverbs", although these apparently correspond to each other. (The former is defined as "adverbs that express a single point or span in time".) Also, "temporal location" looks a bit like a contradiction in terms.

For your convenience, the links to the other two category pairs are
 * Category:Gothic temporal location adverbs > Category:Gothic punctual adverbs and
 * Category:Hungarian temporal location adverbs > Category:Hungarian punctual adverbs.

Thanks in advance. Adam78 (talk) 17:21, 18 August 2021 (UTC)


 * @Adam78 @-sche @DCDuring I created a poscat for 'point in time adverbs' and unless there are objections I'm going to move 'temporal location adverbs' to this new name. This is consistent with the fact that discussions of temporal adverbs typically divide them into three categories, called "frequency", "duration" and "point in time". See for example quoting Klein (1994) Time in language, as well as  Note also, which distinguishes "adverbs of time", "adverbs of duration" and "adverbs of frequency". To me this new name, even if a bit bulky, is more or less self-explanatory and far better than either "temporal location" (which suggests a spatial location and seems like an oxymoron) or "punctual" (which suggests aspectual semantics rather than simply an adverb that references a particular relative or absolute point in time). Benwing2 (talk) 06:02, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Shouldn't the name use hyphens (ie, 'point-in-time adverbs') to reduce ambiguity? (I'm reminded of 'eats shoots and leaves' and other cautionary examples.)
 * The association of temporal with spatial location is a natural one. Our category names, especially the linguistic ones, are mostly inside baseball, of little importance to normal users, but possibly liked by people who like neat categories or find them useful, like perhaps ESL teachers.
 * I suppose that we could have similar categories for spatial adverbs: 'point location' and 'direction' come to mind, but 'area/region/space location' may also be meaningful and distinct.
 * A test for a set of categories that bears on its intelligibility and utility is whether the members of the set are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. (See MECE principle.) I don't think that PoS subcategories tend to be. In real-world category structures 'collectively exhaustive" is achieved by having categories like 'adverbs not otherwise categorized'. Is that what we are doing with direct placement in the hypernym categories? DCDuring (talk) 16:59, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
 * I am fine with renaming these to "English point-in-time adverbs". Side issue: some of the entries in the category seem incorrectly categorized: "twenty-four seven" does not seem like it's designating a point in time the way "in three days time" does, and I'm going to RFV sense 2 of "from dawn to dusk". - -sche (discuss) 05:28, 31 March 2024 (UTC)
 * ✅., please feel free to fix the categorization of the English time adverbs; some of them definitely look misclassified. Benwing2 (talk) 07:01, 31 March 2024 (UTC)