Properties

[John Reimer]

Hello Benji,

> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> 
>> "John Reimer" <terminal.node at gmail.com> wrote in message
>> news:28b70f8c119528cb42154f5d14e0 at news.digitalmars.com...
>> 
>>> Hello Nick,
>>> 
>>>> But, of course, adjectives (just like "direct/indirect objects")
>>>> are themselves nouns.
>>>> 
>>> Umm... May I make a little correction here?
>>> Adjectives are not nouns.  They are used to /describe/ nouns.
>>> -JJR
>>> 
>> Maybe there's examples I'm not thinking of, and I'm certainly no
>> natural language expert, but consider these:
>> 
>> "red"
>> "ball"
>> "red ball"
>> By themselves, "red" and "ball" are both nouns. Stick the noun "red"
>> in front of ball and "red" becomes an adjectve. (FWIW,
>> "dictionary.reference.com" lists "red" as both a noun and an
>> adjective). The only adjectives I can think of at the moment (in my
>> admittedly quite tired state) are words that are ordinarly nouns on
>> their own.  I would think that the distinguishing charactaristic of
>> an adjective vs noun would be the context in which it's used.
>> 
>> Maybe I am mixed up though, it's not really an area of expertise for
>> me.
>> 
> Incidentally...
> 
> I used to do a lot of work in natural language processing, and our
> parsing heuristics were built to handle a lot of adjective/noun
> ambiguity.
> 
> For example, in the phrase "car dealership", the word "car" is an
> adjective that modifies "dealership".
> 
> For the most part, you can treat adjectives and nouns as being
> functionally identical, and the final word in a sequence of adjectives
> and nouns becomes the primary noun of the noun-phrase.
> 
> --benji
> 


Interesting.  There is certainly room to play here.  I never thought of this 
potential ambiguity of "nouns" and "adjectives" in a noun phrase.

Thanks for the info.  I'll look into this a little more.

I guess Nick wasn't /that/ far of track. :)

-JJR