Properties

[Christopher Wright]

Benji Smith wrote:
> 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".

It's a genitive phrase, not an adjective. You couldn't say "That 
dealership is car", for instance, but you could say "That is a 
dealership of cars."

> 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.

No, you can't: "I gave the postman chlamydia." What is postman chlamydia?

> --benji