Properties

[John Reimer]

Hello Christopher,

> 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
>> 


The reason I conceeded a little on this one is because of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_phrase.

I'm not sure if wikipedia can be absolutely trusted... but this is beyond 
my grammatical knowledge to argue absolutely.  In a sentence diagram, I would 
assume that adjectives would have to be distinctly positioned.

In Benji's example, I assume practicality of implementation is what allows 
adjectives/nouns to be treated similarly, not necessarily strict adherence 
to grammatical rules.

Just guessing...

-JJR