Properties

[Jarrett Billingsley]

On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 11:02 PM, Nick Sabalausky <a at a.a> wrote:
>
> 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.

That "red" can be used as both a noun and as an adjective is just a
coincidence.  Well, it's not entirely coincidental - there are many
adjectives which have been nominalized like this.  Some other
languages (like Spanish) allow you to use an adjective as a noun, in
which case it's like saying "<adjective> one" i.e. "el gordo" = "the
fat [one]".  In English, though, that process is far from productive.
Consider the adjectives "sleepy", "hard", or "loud".  There are of
course nominalized forms of these - sleepiness, hardness, loudness -
but they're separate words.