Hello Benji,
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".
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
Interesting. There is certainly room to play here. I never thought of this
potential ambiguity of "nouns" and "adjectives" in a noun phrase.
Thanks for the info. I'll look into this a little more.
I guess Nick wasn't /that/ far of track. :)
-JJR
