For one, every single example sentence in every one of my dictionaries neglects to put a comma before “as wellâ€. If you go to, say,
The Corpus of Contemporary American English, you will find a search for “as well .†will yield many results without the comma before, and a small minority with it. That’s the short of it. The long exposition is more than most people would
want to deal with, but follows rules that many do find instinctive, even if those many couldn’t pinpoint exactly why it is so.
It is a common mistake to think that you should put the comma before the “too†at the end of the sentence in all cases. In truth, there is no grammatical basis to this; it’s just how English speakers talk, and this usage is so common that it seems like it
must be a rule. But to tell the truth, there is NO grammatical rule that says that a pause requires a comma; we just use them for adverbs very very often. In fact, the comma in my previous sentence (and this one) isn’t strictly necessary; it just sits there so you don’t run on into the next word and get confused.
Compare a different adverb, with a more clearly different meaning between a disjunct and :
He played the accordion sadly.
This means that the accordion player is either sad when he is playing, or that he played music in a manner that evokes sadness (maybe even unskillfully, depending on context). This is ambiguous, but it takes a
very uptight person or a very delicate difference for anyone to really care. Compare to:
He played the accordion, sadly.
This is more like a lamentation (if, say, your brother was unable to join a heavy metal band for this reason, or for some repugnant reason the speaker don’t like the fact that Weird Al sings comedic songs instead of highbrow opera). The “sadly†here is a disjunct, and the meaning stands out somewhat independent of the rest of the sentence (though you cannot simply use it on its own). In other words, it doesn’t modify any
specific part of the rest of the sentence, but the whole rest of the clause it accompanies. You could remove the word “sadly†here, and you do not lose a particular meaning to the sentence, so much as the attitude.
Now we move on to the most common confusion point: the word “tooâ€. For the sake of clarity, we will pretend the definition of “too†in the sense of “excessively†doesn’t exist here, since it’s really just a different word with the same spelling and will only serve to confuse this explanation.
Compare these two sentences:
He came along too.
He came along, too.
Some people will balk at the first one, because they are so used to seeing the latter form, and would probably read them the same way. But the meaning is actually
very slightly different. You would really have to be splitting hairs to even know the difference, since really it’s best to just go for the most obvious meaning: some guy came along in addition to someone else (who? This sentence alone doesn’t say). The “too†in the latter sentence, however, is a disjunct, on virtue of the comma being used. But it sounds more natural, and that’s why people would write it that way
n-1 times out of
n times, where
n is some number I couldn’t begin to pinpoint.
The second sentence, however, can be interpreted another way: a complaint. Let’s be disjunct-conscious and compare these two:
And it was such a wonderful pie too.
And it was such a wonderful pie, too.
The first one is a bit less emotional. It almost certainly has some other pie in mind (like if you were judging pies at a state fair. Maybe you’re having a hard time deciding between Mrs. Smith’s and Mrs. Ditherby’s entries).
The second one reads more like a complaint. It’d be a valid thing to say if you were talking about the 26th pie to disappear from your windowsill, or regret that ants got on it. Some people might read the meaning implicated by the first sentence into this one, but the complaint is the more likely intention,
if you care about the difference between disjuncts (there are grammarians who don’t, and to be honest, I don’t observe it
toovery carefully myself, but there are points where it
does matter and will help things sound less awkward).
The thing with the word “too†is that we speakers of English use it so often that we tolerate a good deal more ambivalence than we would with a word like “sadlyâ€. Gotta make the language flow well, and just let people speak what they need ta, y’know? And to add to the confusion, we don’t move “too†in the sense of this afterthought to any other part of the sentence; it’s more of something that completes your sentence, like a verbal period, almost. It’s one of a few English disjuncts that work that way. If you said:
He, too, was a leader of the Resistance.
or
He too was a leader of the Resistance.
then nobody would be confused at all what you mean, but the first form would be the way most people with any flair for drama or gravitas would read it.
But then we come to other adverbs. In this case, “as well†(an adverbial phrase, technically, but English isn’t some logical language where we run words together to make them more cohesive... well, not as often as, say, German or Japanese puts nouns together, for instance. And you can even argue that it constitutes an adverbial clause in itself, but that’s just going waaaay into TMI-land for our purposes here). It is important that the adverb here modify a specific word in the clause (technically, the verb; adverbs don’t modify nouns). That is, he wishes to
show his power since someone else has shown theirs, and the “as well†means that makes two (or three, or four...). But you can’t really move this phrase “as well†like you could with a disjunct (for a disjunct it is not). You might make it more awkward and less powerful-sounding but still technically correct if you move it to this configuration:
I as well will show you my power.
I, as well, will show you my power.
but the commas are extraneous. Taking it back to the example where the word “sadly†is a clear disjunct or clearly not:
He sadly played the accordion.
He, sadly, played the accordion.
Doing what adverbs do, we can shift the location of the adverb and maybe change the connotation slightly, but the literal meanings (and their differences) are basically the same as when I introduced these sentences.
In conclusion: I am well aware that my mother cannot speak English perfectly even after being an American citizen for over two decades. Stuff like this is
complicated; even if it falls under strict rules, most people speaking all languages have to run on their gut rather than being able to spout a 700-page comprehensive grammar of it. Moreover, rules do change once in a while (well... often, actually, just not all that radically within a single lifetime except in very special circumstances, and even then it’s usually because an army and/or a flag is backing it up), and exceptions to the strictest of rules abound to facilitate discourse, and sets of exceptions often are what make up that which we call a “dialect†instead of a separate language. You might not agree with everything I say here on basis of a differing experience with the English language, but that’s okay because you speak
COMMUNIST >:o
Nah, just messin. :D
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\ Point me to some resource that talks about "as well", and I'll gladly shut my trap. I teach this stuff for a living, so any chance at improving my grammar is greatly appreciated.