Benji Smith wrote:
Nick Sabalausky wrote:
"John Reimer" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
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
