So now let's turn back to this phrase borrowed from Latin, in situ. How would one best introduce this phrase to the world? As an adverb? I say no. That's not the essence of its being. It is a Latin prepositional phrase that that can be pressed into service, I will grudgingly admit, as an adverb in a very broad sense, but it is very often used as an adjective. So in putting together a list of words or phrases under the heading of adverbs, I would not include this phrase.Ah, well, what do we mean by
is an adverb?
To me things bigger than words can be any part of speech when they fill the slot for that part of speech. The terms, after all, are really just arbitrary labels that somebody came up with during an analysis of the language (or borrowed from somewhere else) and applied. And dictionaries try to give succinct information about how a word, term, phrase is used syntactically in in a sentence.
It's kind of like compounds. What is "backseat driver"? I would say it's a compound noun. Others would say it was two nouns, with one masquerading as an adjective. Syntactically,
backseat driver works just like
book or bagel, and that's why it'd be a noun for me. I realize that you find all this rubbish, as is your right.
I did not mention before, but part of how I analyse the situation of
in situ (here it's a noun) is colored by what I have studied about heads in linguistics (
link). All phrase have a head, that is the word (whose part of speech-ness) that determines the the the part of speech that the phrase is. Anyway, one of the problems I have with a traditional analysis of prepositions in English is that many of them show up in two different places: i.e., as particles (or preverbs in the older tradition) that attach themselves more or less to verbs given the verbs new meanings. For me, in "Mary looked up the author online",
looked up is a verb. I am nervous calling
up a preposition here, because it's not acting like one.
Up in this instance is acting more like an adverb (
mirabile dictu). The
up can even move behind the noun (or noun phrase) that it can be imagined to be the preposition of: e.g., "Mary looked the author up online". So, is
up a preposition that plays an adverb or a verbal particle, or does it belong to some other category that traditional grammarians did not notice or name?
Ah, well, I can tell I am not convincing you, and though I understand your analysis, I just don't think it would too helpful to the users of the dictionary. Folks who haven't studied Latin don't know how to analyze the phrase
in situ, anymore than they know how to analyze the phrase I used above (which is categorized in the dictionary as an interjection). For them,
in situ is a funny word (or phrase) that can be used as an adjective or an adverb. In the end it's not so much about what you call it as how you use it.
