English Language & Usage Asked by NikitaBaksalyar on April 7, 2021
What is the grammatical construct that is used in this sentence?
Apple today announced a third fall 2020 event…
Usually, I see similar phrases written as "Today, Apple announced" or "Apple announced X today". In this case, I interpret the phrase as [pronoun] [adverb] [verb], where today is a verb modifier, but it is unclear if that is the case. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language offers a different interpretation, according to which today can be interpreted as a pronoun, and then it becomes [pronoun] [pronoun] [verb], which is even more confusing.
What is the correct word order in this case and is there a general rule about it?
Nikita.
While that is an unusual position for today in ordinary speech, it is not unusual for several kinds of adverb to precede the verb:
He quickly replied.
They confidently said ...
She apparently wrote ...
You slowly answered ...
Furthermore, this placing of adverbs of time is quite common in journalism. The iWeb corpus has 67998 instances of "today announced".
Incidentally, Apple is a (proper) noun, not a pronoun.
Correct answer by Colin Fine on April 7, 2021
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