Nick Sabalausky wrote:
"John Reimer" <terminal.n...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:28b70f8c119528cb42154f5d1...@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".
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.
--benji
