{"id":17634,"date":"2018-10-09T13:05:46","date_gmt":"2018-10-09T20:05:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=17634"},"modified":"2018-10-09T13:05:46","modified_gmt":"2018-10-09T20:05:46","slug":"john-lennon-n-attrib","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2018\/10\/09\/john-lennon-n-attrib\/","title":{"rendered":"John Lennon, n attrib."},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Occasionally I say things like <I>I don\u2019t believe that adverbs exist<\/i> or <i>There isn\u2019t really any such thing as an adjective<\/i>. And, yeah, I\u2019m mostly doing that to be obnoxious, but in truth it\u2019s probably the biggest thing that has broken my idea of grammar\u2014the realization that I was taught an utterly false Schoolhouse Rock notion of the parts of speech that clearly delineates nine (or maybe eight) parts of speech, and that every word could be clearly identified by what part of speech it is.\r\n<p>The OED Word of the Day today is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oed.com\/view\/Entry\/259170\">John Lennon<\/a>, which the OED calls an <i>attributive noun<\/i>. What the hell? It denotes a particular style of eyewear that is associated with the man\u2014it can\u2019t be used as a real noun at all, but only as a modifier of something like <I>glasses<\/i> or <i>specs<\/i> or <i>shades<\/i>. How is that a noun at all? And the answer is that it isn\u2019t, really, it\u2019s an <I>attributive noun<\/i> which is a noun only in the sense that it\u2019s not really an adjective. \r\n<p>It\u2019s worth taking a moment, then, to ask: what the hell is an adjective, anyway? And the answer is that there really isn\u2019t any such thing.\r\n<p>\n<!-- iframe plugin v.6.0 wordpress.org\/plugins\/iframe\/ -->\n<iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/NkuuZEey_bs\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" 0=\"allowfullscreen\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\"><\/iframe>\n\r\n<p> The Schoolhouse Rock style answer is that an adjective describes a noun\u2014but is everything that modifies a noun therefore an adjective? No. In the phrase <I>shower curtain<\/i>, for instance, the word <i>shower<\/i> is definitely not an adjective, but it definitely modifies the word <I>curtain<\/i>. Similarly in the phrase <i>shower curtain rod<\/i>, <i>curtain<\/i> is not an adjective, nor is <I>shower<\/i> an adverb modifying an adjective. In the phrase <i>shower curtain rod bracket<\/i>\u2026 in the phrase <i>shower curtain rod bracket screw<\/i>\u2026 in the phrase <i>shower curtain rod bracket screw bin<\/i>\u2026 why are all those modifiers not adjectives? How can you tell?\r\n<p>Fifty years ago Philip Gove, the editor of <cite>Webster\u2019s Third<\/cite>, wrote a fascinating article called \u201c\u2018Noun Often Attributive\u2019 and \u2018Adjective\u2019\u201d (<cite>American Speech<\/cite>, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Oct., 1964), pp. 163-175) in which he mentions four tests for whether a word is or is not an adjective:\r\n<ul><li><strong>Can the word be used both attributively and predicatively? <\/strong> You can say <i>She hung an opaque curtain<\/i> and <i>The curtain she hung was opaque <\/i>. You can say <i>She hung a shower curtain<\/i> but not <i>*The curtain she hung was shower<\/i>.<\/li>\r\n<li><strong>Can the word be used comparatively?<\/strong> You can say <i>This curtain is more opaque than that curtain<\/i> but not <i>*This curtain is more shower than that curtain.<\/i><\/li>\r\n<li><strong>Can the word take common adverbial modifiers such as <I>very<\/i>?<\/strong> You can say <i>This curtain is very opaque <\/i> but not <i>*This curtain is very shower<\/i>.<\/li>\r\n<li><strong>Can you make derivative words by adding suffixes such as <i>-ly<\/i> or <i>-ness<\/i>?<\/strong>. You can talk about the <i>opaqueness of the curtain<\/i> but not the <i>*showerness of the curtain<\/i>.<\/li><\/ul>\r\n<p>If a word passes all four tests, it\u2019s an adjective. There! Surely adjectives are actual things if there is such a complicated test for figuring out whether there is one or not! Right?\r\n<p>No.\r\n<p>What if a word is clearly used as a modifier and doesn\u2019t pass all those tests\u2014are any of those words adjectives? Yes. Many of them. Some of them. Maybe. Depending on a bunch of things. My favorite bit out of the article I mentioned is that <I>iron<\/i> is absolutely an adjective\u2014not because it passes the tests, but has because it always been listed as an adjective in dictionaries, so we can\u2019t stop now.\r\n<p>The other point about the tests is that we don\u2019t teach them when we teach people what an <i>adjective<\/i> is. That wouldn\u2019t make any sense to anyone. Nobody thinks that an adjective is a word that can be used both attributively and predicatively, can be used comparatively, can take certain common modifiers and can be the basis for certain derivatives. That\u2019s not what an adjective is at all! Is it?\r\n<p>The much simpler answer is that there is no such thing as an adjective. We want there to be adjectives\u2014we want there to be simple categories and rules for putting things in them\u2014and so we make believe that adjectives exist. And that\u2019s fine! Like <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2018\/08\/27\/eady\/\">spelling<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2018\/08\/27\/eady\/#comment-1241\">money<\/a> and national borders and the reasonable man, it\u2019s a thing that doesn\u2019t actually exist, but it\u2019s sometimes helpful for people to pretend it does.\r\n<p>Thanks,<br>-Ed.\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You may say, I&#8217;m a dreamer, but I&#8217;m not the only one.<\/p>\n<p>Well, maybe I&#8217;m the only one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-parts-of-speech"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17634"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17637,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17634\/revisions\/17637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}