Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Question about a grammatical term

From:Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Date:Friday, October 4, 2002, 4:07
On Wed, 2 Oct 2002 23:56:49 -0500, Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>
wrote:

>Christophe Grandsire wrote: >> Another analysis of the examples which could be valid is to consider the first >> part of the compounds as an adjective, which qualifies thus the second noun. >> Since parts of speech in English have somewhat blurry frontiers, it could be >> valid. > >Not really. You can't say, for example "A more water cooler" or "That >cooler is very water" or any other characteristics of adjectives. The >only characteristic they share with adjectives is modifying. I'd call >the first component a modifying noun.
Is that really a characteristic of all adjectives? You wouldn't say "the more next day" or "my very left hand", but it doesn't make much sense to consider "next" and "left" as nouns, or every use of "next" or "left" together with a noun as a compound. That doesn't mean that words like "water" in "water cooler" are adjectives (I think it's pretty clear that "water cooler" is a compound), but just that there's more than one category of word loosely described as "adjectives". (Interestingly, you can say "the very next day", but I think that's just a bizarre idiomatic usage of "very"; you can't say "the day is very next".) -- languages of Azir------> ---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/index.html>--- hmiller (Herman Miller) "If all Printers were determin'd not to print any @io.com email password: thing till they were sure it would offend no body, \ "Subject: teamouse" / there would be very little printed." -Ben Franklin

Reply

Padraic Brown <elemtilas@...>