Is this an adverbial clause?
Rise to the top 3% as a developer or hire one of them at Toptal: https://topt.al/25cXVn
--------------------------------------------------
Music by Eric Matyas
https://www.soundimage.org
Track title: Lost Meadow
--
Chapters
00:00 Is This An Adverbial Clause?
00:16 Accepted Answer Score 5
02:07 Answer 2 Score 0
02:26 Thank you
--
Full question
https://english.stackexchange.com/questi...
--
Content licensed under CC BY-SA
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/lice...
--
Tags
#grammar #adverbs
#avk47
ACCEPTED ANSWER
Score 5
"How they are spoken" is a clause of manner or an interrogative clause, subordinate to the preposition "on".
"On how they are spoken" is then a prepositional phrase. As an alternative, you could say that "how they are spoken" is a noun clause that is the object of "depending on".
Now to "depending on how they are spoken". It is not a clause: it merely contains a clause. If you take "depending on" as a preposition, it is a prepositional phrase expressing a condition or something like that. Or could it be regarded as a participial phrase? Consider this sentence:
The age of your date? She may be old or young, depending on what you filled in as a preference on the siteādon't you remember?
Suppose "depending" were a participle. Then it could be rephrased thus:
A. She may be old or young, while she depends on what you filled in...
This does not make much sense. A better rephrasing would be this:
B. She may be old or young, which depends on what you filled in...
It seems clear that "depending" is not a participle, or it would have belonged to the subject "she". Therefore it must be a preposition here.
Your example would give this, if it were taken as a participle:
A. Both can be quite strong, as they depend on how they are spoken.
Or it could be a preposition:
B. Both can be quite strong, which depends on how they are spoken.
The first interpretation is not entirely impossible, but I'd call it weak at best; the second one sounds much better. Therefore it is best considered a preposition here, which makes the whole phrase an adverbial adjunct of condition.
ANSWER 2
Score 0
First let's define Adverbial Clause:
An adverbial clause is a clause that functions as an adverb. In other words, it contains subject (explicit or implied) and predicate, and it modifies a verb(wikipidia)
Hence in case it's an adverbial clause.