Re: Question about a grammatical term
From: | Padraic Brown <elemtilas@...> |
Date: | Friday, October 4, 2002, 21:25 |
--- Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
> Is that really a characteristic of all adjectives?
> You wouldn't say "the
> more next day" or "my very left hand", but it
"Next" is a superlative, and whether or not people
realise it, they don't preface a superlative adjective
with "more": *the more greenest leaf. The latter
example is perfectly ok: my very own car, my very
lovely girlfriend, etc.
> 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.
Agreed. Chances are pretty good they're simply
adj+noun.
> 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".)
Different kind of "very". The one above is very =
extremely; this last one is an intensive.
Padraic.
=====
raps il tenós mathin la ngouerma;
mays comez le nces il luchets le secund.
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