1) Нe went upstairs quietly last night.
2) Нe quietly went upstairs last night.
What version is right? I can't find information about this issue.
Learn English – Order of multiple adverbs
adverb-positionadverbs
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Yes - I can't find anything grammatically wrong, but certainly your second example doesn't sound natural. It's probably, as you imply, that a lot of information is being condensed into a small space, when it might be better put in extended constructions (get a move on with those prepositional phrases!) or even more than one sentence.
She waited outside this morning.
She waited impatiently outside.
??She waited impatiently this morning.
She waited impatiently outside the school this morning.
She waited - impatiently - outside, this morning.
She waited outside this morning. Impatiently.
Of course, there are some who would say that outside is an intransitive preposition in your second example (and in four of mine).
I've found an article covering 'the Royal Order of Adverbs' at the Farlex Grammar Book. Here are some salient points:
What is the order of adverbs?
Because adverbs are used to modify verbs, adjectives, other adverbs, phrases, clauses, or even entire sentences, they are able to function nearly anywhere in the sentence, depending on their type and what it is they are modifying.
If we use more than one adverb to describe a verb, though, there is a general order in which the different categories of adverbs should appear—this is known as the order of adverbs (sometimes called the royal order of adverbs):
Manner
Place
Frequency
Time
Purpose
Of course, it is uncommon to use five adverbs in a row to modify the same word, but if a sentence uses two or three, then it is best to follow this order to avoid sounding unnatural....
(*Note: For the sake of conciseness, both single-word adverbs and adverbial phrases will be referred to together as “adverbs” throughout this section.) ...
[I]if we were to make a sentence with all five categories of adverbs together, it might look like this:
“I have to run quickly (manner) down the street (place) each morning (frequency) after breakfast (time) in order to catch my bus to school (purpose).”
Even though the string of adverbs is unusually long, the sentence still sounds smooth and logical because the order is correct. Now let’s try rearranging the order of the adverbs:
“I have to run each morning (frequency) quickly (manner) after breakfast (time) in order to catch my bus to school (purpose) down the street (place).”
By changing the order of the adverbs, we’ve actually changed the meaning of the sentence, or at least made the original meaning nearly incomprehensible. This is especially apparent with the adverbial phrase of purpose 'in order to catch my bus to school'— by placing it before the adverb of place, it now sounds as though it’s the school that’s down the street. There is not such a drastic shift in meaning for the adverbs of frequency, manner, and time, but they still sound awkward and unnatural in the new order.
When we can change the order
There is a great deal of flexibility regarding where in a sentence an adverb can appear, regardless of its content and the rules of order that we looked at above. While the order of adverbs is useful to keep in mind, it is a guide, rather than a law.
..........
Multiple adverbs of the same category
When we use multiple adverbs of the same category to modify the same verb, we order them based on how specific the information is that they provide. For example:
“On my father’s ranch (place), I often (frequency) helped gather the animals at the end of the day (specific time) when I was younger (non-specific time).”
“I lived at home (more specific place) with my parents (less specific place) to save money (purpose) while I was working on my doctorate (time).”
And if the Royal Order ruling has to be seen as a rule of thumb, it is almost inconceivable that this codicil is more binding.
Adverb placement is not fixed, and as with other elements, I think most of it depends on what you want to express.
"He has always been an academic and a charitable person". This is a kind assessment of a man, and also the simplest and most common construction.
"He always has been an academic and a charitable person.* This is more emphatic, as if in defense of some alternate version of his history.
"He has been a wise and, always, a charitable person." This emphasizes the constancy of the latter attribute. All are "correct".
"We had been slowly drifting down the river when a bear attacked." is no different really than "We had been drifting slowly down the river when a bear attacked." To my ear (AmE), the latter sounds a bit more common. I agree it would be unusual to break up had been in this case, but "he had often been seen..." is not an unusual construction.
"He had been either sick or exhausted." is much the same as "He had either been sick or exhausted." Here, either is emphasized because of it's less common placement. Both are grammatically correct.
Best Answer
I don't think there is any theory that accounts successfully for adverb placement in English. McCawley gives a pretty straightforward theory in The Syntactic Phenomena of English. It goes like this. Adverbs are modifiers, and the natural places for modifiers are prefixed to what they modify or suffixed to what they modify. "Quietly", like other manner adverbs, modifies V' (or, what are also called VP).
The basic constituent structure of your example is
and "last night", being a time adverbial, is either a V' modifier or an S modifier, so if it's a V' modifier, we have:
and so we'd predict 4 possible positions for "quietly", before and after the two V's in this structure, which I'll number:
For this particular example, the theory works pretty well, except that there are a couple of other places the "quietly" could go.