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Adverbs modifying adjectives: very difficult?

In this exercise where we look at how adverbs can be used with adjectives. In addition to examining different meanings added when using adverbs, the exercise should encourage an awareness of synonyms and offer suggestions of how to vary the language.

Adjectives can be used with a preceding adverb. The adverb can make the sense of the adjective stronger or weaker. A very common way of modyfing adjectives is with the word very: Very bad, very good, very happy.
  • Try to think of some other adverbs that you can use to make an adjective stronger or weaker.
  • Write three sentences including the word difficult. Then add an adverb. How does that change the meaning?
  • Now make a search in the corpus for the word difficult preceded by an adverb. [illustration: Query builder, with Addkey query in first content node, phrase query in the second, link 'Next'] . Download 50 random hits.
    • What different adverbs do you find (you may want to sort the lines to see the different adverbs more easily)?
    • Do these make difficult stronger or weaker?
    • Can you list three adverbs that you could use instead of very to get a similar meaning?
    You can repeat the search to see more/other examples.
[Illustration: Adverb + difficult]

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