#adverbs - the wastebin of syntactic categories

[sentence-arborist]

isn't "fucking" just an interjection? granted i have NO idea where that goes on the tree, plus my linguistics training is almost wholly anthropological, but you can put fucking anywhere in a sentence to strengthen the sentence as a whole's meaning. does that still make it an adverb? (sorry if this doesn't make sense i'm coming down from a migraine)

For context, this ask is probably about this recent tree [LINK].

Long story short, yes, you could just analyse this case with a non-projecting interjection category. At the end of the day, we don't have a theoretically robust definition of "adverb" so the real choice here boils down to (1) do you think fucking is acting more like other interjections or more like other intensifying adverbs in a particular clause, and (2) do you think fucking can be modified in that clause.

My main point of reference for the adverb analysis was other intensifiers such as literally or totally, which I would naturally analyse as adverbs. Compare:

(1) He just fucking killed that guy! (2) He just literally killed that guy! (3) He just totally killed that guy!

If I compare (1) with (2-3) and then with more classic interjections like (4-5), it definitely seems to me that (1) is much closer to (2-3), syntactically and semantically.

(4) He just, er, killed that guy! (5) Fuck, he just killed that guy!

That said, we would normally expect projecting adverbs to be able to take modification, and while that is true of literally in (2), I struggled to construct any acceptable sentences with either fucking or totally in which a modifier unambiguously applied to the adverb/interjection. (The closest I could get was "absolutely fucking killed that guy", but it's unclear here whether absolutely should be read as modifying fucking or killed, and I didn't manage to construct any tests I was entirely happy with for this in the free time I had to write up this response.)

(6) He just (*very) fucking killed that guy! (7) He just very/quite literally killed that guy! (8) He just (*very) totally killed that guy!

So I can see arguments either way. Obviously, English expletive insertion is a whole can of worms - not least because it arguably violates lexical integrity, if you believe the rule that gives you He just fucking killed that guy / He just killed that fucking guy / He fucking just killed that guy / etc. is the same rule that gives you abso-fucking-lutely. I opted for the adverb analysis on the basis of literally, but if you prefer the interjection analysis, it's definitely defensible, at least on the basis of the evidence gathered here.

P.S. Obviously all the above discussion assumes we're talking about fucking as an intensifier. Fucking as a verb ("they were fucking like rabbits") or as a noun ("all the fucking I did over the summer") are neither interjections nor adverbs!