Hello Nick,
"John Reimer" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
Hello Nick,
"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.
No problem. I am not saying a word can't be /used/ as an adjective
and noun in different contexts. I'm just saying that they can't be
an adjective and noun at the same time as your first post suggested.
Grammatically, adjectives are not nouns (ever), even if the words
themselves can be used as either in independent contexts; they just
modify nouns. Like Jarett mentions, the fact that words that are
adjectives in one context can shapeshift to another part of speech
(the noun) in another, is immaterial to the definition: you just have
to recognize when it happens and realize the change that has occurred
in the part of speech.
I guess that's a difference between natural languages and
oop-languages then. A member variable of an object typically
/describes an attribute/ of the object, and thus makes it comparable
to the notion of "adjective", but in an oop-language (and apperently
unlike a natural language) that member object is itself either another
object or a primitive.
Yes, although natural languages and programming languages might share some
similarities, natural langauges are going to be much more complex (even though
both consist of grammars and alphabets). I know there's a whole science and
theory of natural language analysis of which I'm mostly ignorant beyond a
basic introduction. Much of the research of computer languages and compilers
seems to have borrowed from the study of natural languages (see Noam Chomsky).
I need to study it more myself.
Also I just want to make clear that my explanation above was meant only to
emphasize English grammar rules. I don't know enough about other natural
langauges to make the statement universally applicable. There are some very
"unusual" natural languages out there that will have a very different grammar
such that, I suppose, they would seem to break the rules familiar to an English
speaker. But, of course, a different language is not subject to the rules
of the English grammar, so it should be no surprise.
-JJR
