Re: Question about a grammatical term

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".)

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