"Everything is all good"
"Everything is all good." One of the reasons it is not easy to learn English is that although sentence structures are the same, speech parts can be various. And I think that this is also one of the controversial issues among people. What is the speech part of "all" in the sentence. I think we can see it as both of a pronoun and an adverb meaning completely, but I prefer to see it as a pronoun that is equal to "everything" like "They are all students or We are all happy." What do you native English speakers think about it? Thank you so much as usual in advance and have a good day.
All can function as an indefinite pronoun (some dictionaries also call this a predeterminer), an adverb, or a noun.
In your sentence, all functions as an adverb that modifies the verb "is" and provides emphasis. If you replace the verb "is" with an equal sign, your basic sentence becomes "everything = good" -- not "everything = all". Now, you could have a sentence that reads "everything is all" (or everything = all), but that is not what you wrote.
However, the difference between all as a pronoun and all as an adverb can be very slight -- and not always apparent to the non-native speaker. Here is an example of all used as a pronoun (from the Oxford English Dictionary):
the men are all bearded
Now that seems very similar to your phrase in structure, doesn't it? What is the difference? Well, it comes in the nature of "good". As a pronoun, all is "used to refer to the whole quantity or extent of a particular group or thing." Good is an abstract concept which cannot have a quantity or extent, so I concluded that all was being used to emphasis "good" -- thus being used as adverb, at least according to the dictionary.
I hope this helps.
|link comment||edited Aug 19 '12 at 14:22 Jeff Pribyl Grammarly Fellow|
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