rarely,seldom,hardly,scarcely,barely的用法和区别

Question

rarely,seldom,hardly,scarcely,barely的用法和区别

Answer 1

Strictly speaking,the use of ever after rarely and seldom is redundant;
She rarely ever watches television adds nothing to
She rarely watches television.In an earlier survey a large majority of the Usage Panel found this construction unacceptable in formal writing.But ever has been used as an intensive with rarely for several hundred years,and the construction is common in informal contexts.By contrast,the constructions rarely (or seldom) if ever and rarely (or seldom) or never are unexceptionable:
She rarely if ever watches television.
She rarely or never watches television.
See:hardly redundancy
The use of hardly with a negative is avoided in Standard English.Some critics have been puzzled that adverbs such as hardly,rarely,and scarcely should be treated as negatives in the traditional strictures against double negation,which tars sentences like I couldn't hardly see him with the same brush as I didn't get none.After all,they argue,the sentence Mary hardly laughed entails that Mary did laugh,not that she didn't,and therefore does not express a negative proposition.But hardly and scarcely occur with other negative expressions in a number of ways.For one thing,they combine with items such as any and at all,which are characteristically associated with negative contexts:we say I hardly saw him at allor I never saw him at all but not I occasionally saw him at all;we say I hardly had any time or I didn't have any timebut not I had any time,and so on.Like other negative adverbs,hardlytriggers inversion of the subject and auxiliary when it begins a sentence.Thus we say Hardly had I arrived when she left,on the pattern of Never have I read such a book or At no time has he condemned the movement.Such inversion is not used with other adverbs:we would not say Occasionally has he addressed this question or To a slight degree have they changed their position.The fact is that adverbs such as hardly are semantically negative in that they qualify a state or an event relative to the limiting case of nonoccurrence.Thus the meaning of hardly is,roughly,揳lmost not at all?the meaning of rarely is 损ractically never?and so forth.These adverbs are felt to have a negative component in their meaning,and it should not be surprising that grammarians have reacted to combinations of hardly with negatives in the same way that they have reacted to combinations of pairs of negatives such as not and none.
See:double negative rarely scarcely
Scarcely has the force of a negative and is therefore regarded as incorrectly used with another negative,as in I couldn't scarcely believe it.A clause following scarcely is correctly introduced by when or before; the use of than,though common,is still unacceptable to some grammarians:The meeting had scarcely begun when (or before but not than) it was interrupted.
See:double negative hardly