Edmund, "Book fair" was a bad example. It's a compound noun, so "book" isn't an adjective there at all. There is an independent reason why nouns can't take adjective suffixes, and that's that for an adjective to take the comparative and superlative it has to be a degree word. So "long" and "thoughtful" can be compared, but "dead" and "unique" can't, although for many the meaning of "unique" has changed so as to make it a degree word. Nouns tend not to be degree words, and so they wouldn't take adjectival suffixes anyway. So much for that argument. Herb -----Original Message----- From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F Sent: 2008-02-23 21:13 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Form and function Edmund, It's not only in historical change that categories are shown to be fuzzy. Your excellent example with "may" demonstrates the ease with which we can make a word fit a different category to powerful effect. This works better with some categories than with others. We can noun just about anything, as you did with "may." We can also "verb" pretty easily, and some interesting papers have been published on this process. Of course, it's a maxim of English grammar that "Any noun can be verbed." It's a little more difficult to turn nouns and verbs into adjectives, and I'm not talking about obvious cases like words for color and provenance. With "may," we could say, "Bill and Hank are two more mays." So that modal can be nouned and then take on noun morphology. It's more difficult to assign adjective morphology to a noun. We can say "a book fair" but not so easily "the bookest fair I've been to," although one could construct a context in which it would work. I suspect that we can shift words into open class categories much more readily than into closed class categories. Turning a noun or verb into a preposition or conjunction is a bit harder to do. There are constraints on these processes, but I'm not sure they've been thoroughly explored. Herb -----Original Message----- From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Edmond Wright Sent: 2008-02-23 06:05 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Form and function I'm not a linguist, Herb, but a philosopher, so I am learning from you. You acknowledge that words can be moved about as regards function, but you say that there are 'strict conditions'. Yet the conditions are not so strict since anyone, given sufficient purpose and imagination, can wangle them into another slot. Take 'may': "I wouldn't rely on him -- he's just a may." But of course we still sense the oddity, so we remain aware of the customary use in the game as it is played at this historical juncture. The feel of words belonging primarily to one function surely comes from the fact that these are the habitual usages within the 'rules' at this time. Your 'seethe/sodden' example nicely shows how the sense of word-class can be obvious and active at one time and be wholly abandoned at another -- the usage of a word within the 'rules' has changed -- what started as an odd 'one-off' got picked up by others and became general (or, with 'sodden', perhaps it was that the verb use just faded out). I must concede that we can abstract from these changes and note about the game that there are slots apart from what fills them at any time: thus surely we can distinguish verb from noun in the abstract sense, in the relative placing of these slots in syntax, but, as your example, well shows, we have to hold back from saying that some word now used as a verb is intrinsically and eternally a 'verb' or a 'noun' -- 'sodden' isn't a 'verb' anymore. Edmond Dr. Edmond Wright 3 Boathouse Court Trafalgar Road Cambridge CB4 1DU England Email: [log in to unmask] Website: http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/elw33/ Phone [00 44] (0)1223 350256 To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/