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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. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo! http://sbc.yahoo.com

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Herman Miller <hmiller@...>