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Cushman 11y ago
Not to keep you up, but what's even cooler is that the degree to which you can deviate depends on the adjective's class, too. While I can sorta see "brick ancient barn" working, albeit with such heavy emphasis on "brick" that "ancient barn" turns into a bit of a compound, "grain lone silo" or "fish dry pond" don't sound grammatical to me at all. Maybe also because "grain silo" and "fish pond" are almost-notquite compounds?
- peterfirefly 11y ago
  That ship has sailed. It's 06:40 and the sun has been pouring through my windows for more than an hour :/ The part of my body that has synched up with the daylight refuses to listen to the part that needs sleep. -- "Grain silo" and "fish pond" are exactly-precisely compound nouns. It's just that English refuses to accept that it's a Germanic language and instead puts on airs. Honest languages would of course never dream of inserting pretentious spaces between the constituent parts. I actually thought of "stone chimney" as a compound noun instead of adjective + noun when I wrote it, precisely because I wanted to mock that and really hammer home the point. Unfortunately, the two look the same in English (but not in Danish) -- and I was tired -- so I didn't catch it and replace it with a better example.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    English draws this distinction for gold, with gold (n) and golden (adj).
    - peterfirefly 11y ago
      I actually meant: written in one word (stonechimney, a compound noun) or not (stone chimney, not a compound noun).
  - Cushman 11y ago
    > "Grain silo" and "fish pond" are exactly-precisely compound nouns. Eeeh, not exactly in English. English does make some distinction between fully compounded words and noun phrases, especially in rules of production. In a newer phrase like "wind farm", you can swap in more or less any noun you like, even if it doesn't make a lot of sense: "mud farm", "rock farm", "hair farm"... there's some rule like "substance + farm = a farm that produces that substance". With a word like "bedroom", you can get "bathroom", but not so much "deskroom"; there's no general rule like "furniture + room = room where that furniture is found". The space (in cases where it's pronounced) is kinda your hint there. Anyway... I still don't believe in grammar, but y'all have mounted a spirited defense of the traditional analysis. I'm sorry I tried to say everything's an adjective :)

dsfas 11y ago

"Worstest" seems to be a morphological problem. "Most least" could be permissible, if somewhat exotic sounding, I think, if "least" is read with its adjectival meaning―"used in names of very small animals and plants, e.g., least shrew"―so eg. most least shrew. "So smallest" doesn't work with any other superlative ("most reddest") that I can imagine off the top of my head. And "brick ancient barn" is an unusual order but not ungrammatical, though it is interesting. (It sounds more like listing adjectives, ie. I'd read a larger pause after "brick" and stress on "ancient", than the other order. MATERIAL AGE NOUN seems to read awkwardly.)

Cushman 11y ago
If "brick ancient barn" is too plausible for you to get the full effect, try something with more diverse adjectives like "beef tasty stew" or "laptop lost bag".
- deleted 11y ago
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- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  You really do like fake examples. Can you point to a syntactician making the argument that the "beef" of "beef stew", or the "laptop" of "laptop bag", is an adjective? In any context I'm familiar with, that person would be laughed out of the room.
  - Cushman 11y ago
    Fair point, apart from the invective. How do you feel about "hiking worn boots" or "mixed-breed adorable puppy"?
    - thaumasiotes 11y ago
      "Hiking boots" has the same problem -- the boots aren't themselves hiking, they're boots for use in hiking. That's another noun-noun compound. "Mixed-breed puppy" is, to me, not such a clear case ("breed" is clearly originally a noun, but maybe this use is common enough to have converted). But you don't need to use spurious examples -- in another comment, you provided a very genuine one: "red" and "wooden" are both clearly adjectives, and their ordering cannot vary. This is a well-known example of a somewhat-but-not-entirely mysterious phenomenon in linguistics. Here's a nice recent writeup of what I think is a related phenomenon: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2015/04/28/cutthroat-compounds-in-english-morphology/ https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2015/04/28/cutthroat-compoun... . This one consists of the observation that words like "kickass" and "pickpocket" are suppressed (not illegal, but suppressed) in English because they conflict with our tendency toward right-headedness (that is, in any English compound, the "essence" of the compound should be found at the right end). Instead, we incline more to compounds like "bank robber" or "nose-thumbing" ("engage in a bit of nose-thumbing"). Someone else in this thread already mentioned that they see adjective ordering as a question of which adjectives are more essential to the whole. My problem with your comments here is that you're making arguments based on obviously spurious tests unrelated to the claims you then try to follow (um, lead) with. It's analogous to saying "We need to stop celebrating Thanksgiving by eating turkey. Turkey perpetrated the Armenian genocide, genocide is bad and should be stopped, QED". Stick to honest examples, and you'll find the problems you're talking about are rather muted. Don't let your feeling that the problems are large, and you therefore need extremely malformed examples, lead you into choosing examples that are extremely malformed because they exhibit a completely different problem.
      - Cushman 11y ago
        Well, yeah, I jumped in to defend the idea that the word "the" counts as an adjective. It seems vaguely possible that my argument is not backed by much besides bluster. (And of course the downvotes are my just reward.) To the extent I'm arguing something non-disingenuous, it's just that language is best analyzed with a bit of a fuzzy lens, and words don't fit into neat boxes. Take your claim that "hiking" is a noun: To me, it analyzes as an inflection of a verb ("hike") that can be used to indicate an action ("I was hiking"), the performer or target of an action ("I don't hate hiking, hiking hates me") or as a modifier for something else ("those crummy old worn-out tan leather gusseted hiking boots"). On what basis do you say that it is a noun? Specifically, when looking at the list "crummy old worn-out tan leather gusseted hiking", with modifiers lined up in order of significance, what about the word "hiking" jumps out at you as plainly different in use or meaning? "The boots aren't hiking, they're for hiking"? Clearly-- in this phrase, the word "hiking" means the boots are for hiking! To me, the most intellectually honest thing is to see compound nouns as a sort of epicycle-style theory to explain why words in our non-modifier class are actually used as modifiers all the time, just according to a subtly different set of rules than applies to the modifier class. I don't think there's anything really wrong with that, since it explains things well enough and we might never have something like universal gravitation to set the record straight. What I'm saying is, I don't think I have a problem. Except, of course, when the "rules of grammar" are used as a proxy to cast minorities and lower-class people as unintelligent. That, I have a problem with, and it's quite a popular pastime in the English-speaking world. That's why I think it's important to think scientifically about the extent to which grammar is, and is not, a real thing. (Including, sometimes, hypothesizing things that don't make sense, just to see what happens.)
        thaumasiotes 11y ago
        > Take your claim that "hiking" is a noun: To me, it analyzes as an inflection of a verb ("hike") I wouldn't say you're wrong about this. However, I'd be much more willing to defend the idea that, as it appears here, "hiking" is a one-word noun phrase containing a verb form (and that compound nouns are formed NP-NP, not N-N). Traditional grammar has gifted us with a rich vocabulary of specialized terms for specialized syntactic functions, and the traditional term for a verb form which functions as a noun is "gerund". (Um, technically, infinitive forms can also function as nouns.) I'll pause here to defend myself from an argument you haven't made: there are people who will say that "beef" in "beef stew" is an adjective simply because it modifies a noun. They're wrong. I say that a gerund really is a verb form acting as a noun. The difference is that I'm saying that gerunds can appear in basically all syntactic contexts that permit noun phrases, so the definition I'm using is syntactic (as appropriate for a syntactic term of art like "noun") rather than semantic. I'm not saying gerunds are nouns because they refer to objects -- I'm saying they're nouns because they can be the subjects of verbs (and otherwise appear where nouns appear). To me, the best analysis is just that noun phrases can be constructed from verb forms. Linking back to the subject at hand, I'd agree that "hiking", the word, is not a noun in the same way that "iron", the word, is one, but I am saying that this "hiking", as used in context, is just as much of a noun phrase as "this rusted iron" is. > Specifically, when looking at the list "crummy old worn-out tan leather gusseted hiking", with modifiers lined up in order of significance, what about the word "hiking" jumps out at you as plainly different in use or meaning? In all honesty, what jumps out at me is that all of the others are descriptions, while it would be odd to use "hiking" that way. For example, in a certain style of speech, you could see something like this: Get out and take your crummy, old, worn-out, leather, gusseted, boots with you. (In actual rhetoric, the descriptors would probably be different.) But it's completely impossible for the "hiking" of "hiking boots" to be delimited by commas (in speech, emphatic pauses) that way. If you did it, the meaning of "hiking" would change -- it would mean that the boots were out on a hike. This demonstrates that "hiking" is not a descriptor for "boots" -- rather, "hiking boots" is a single unit. (Yes, with internal structure.) > To me, the most intellectually honest thing is to see compound nouns as a sort of epicycle-style theory to explain why words in our non-modifier class are actually used as modifiers all the time, just according to a subtly different set of rules than applies to the modifier class. English is way more liberal with modifiers than that. He gave me his I'm-going-to-kill-you look. I agree that language requires a bit of a fuzzy lens. But grammar is very much a real thing.

escherplex 11y ago

Other modern languages such as Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and others get by perfectly well without the qualifiers 'the' and 'a', which according to Wikipedia are the first and sixth most frequently used words in English respectively, so they don't seem cognitively compulsory for understanding. And juxtaposing British English with US English 'the' has throw-away status in assertions such as 'I am going to university' (Br) vs. 'I am going to the university' (US) but not in 'I am going to the store' so you're also dealing with local conventions. Plus in common usage 'the' and 'a' can be used in their technical sense in EG, 'not a [any old] car but THE car' with suitable prosody added for effect. With all the spins that can be imposed on articles 'the' and 'a' trying to formalize their use with precise definitions would seem like a lost cause. (and of course definitions use words which themselves remain undefined but please don't go there)

cjhveal 11y ago
It should be noted, however, that while many languages get by without explicitly marking definiteness, there are other linguistic techniques that can provide similar contextual clues that are required for understanding the pragmatic meaning of an utterance. Topic-comment structures[1] are often used to convey a sense of what is assumed as new versus known information. For instance, Russian's relatively free word order allows it to rearrange the constituents of the sentence so that the topic (what is being talked about, usually familiar to the listener) precedes the comment (what is being said about the topic). Japanese has this baked-in with particles that mark the topic (see [2]). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_and_comment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_and_comment [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_grammar#Topic.2C_theme.2C_and_subject:_.E3.81.AF_wa_and_.E3.81.8C_ga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_grammar#Topic.2C_them...
- vorg 11y ago
  I would say that the definiteness use of "the", perhaps alone among English words, doesn't even have a part of speech because it's related to the thematic structure of English, whereas parts of speech are defined in the grammatical structure of languages. So "a" and "the" are different animals in a way, and perhaps shouldn't even be taught together.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    "A" and "the" are most certainly the same part of speech. There are many other words in the same category: many every my some his this Note that "my", "his", and "this" also mark definiteness on the noun phrase.
    - vorg 11y ago
      > "A" and "the" are most certainly the same part of speech. I disagree... > There are many other words in the same category: All these example words add semantic meaning to the noun phrase, and a primary sub-category for their use is whether the noun is countable (e.g. cat) or uncountable (e.g. salt): cats VS salt a cat/any cat, some cats, all cats/every cat VS some salt, all salt no cats, one cat, two cats, ... VS no salt, some salt few cats, many cats VS little salt, much salt my cat/s, our cat/s, your cat/s VS my salt, our salt, your salt his cat/s, her cat/s, its cat/s, their cat/s VS his salt, her salt, its salt, their salt this cat, that cat, these cats, those cats VS this salt, that salt The article "a" is only used with countable nouns (unless an uncountable is being used as a countable with meaning "a type of") and so fits into this sub-categorization. > Note that "my", "his", and "this" also mark definiteness on the noun phrase. In those cases the demonstrative is adding semantic information to the noun, whether possession ("my", "his") or location ("this"). If we split "A cat sitting on the rug meows." into the 2 sentences "A cat is sitting on the rug. The cat meows.", the only function of the "the" in the second sentence is to provide a cohesive link to something in the first sentence. Similarly, "Some salt stored in the shaker spills." can be split into "Some salt is stored in the shaker. The salt spills." This makes "the" solely a cohesive device, independent of the semantics and in the domain of thematics. So "a" and "the" are used orthogonally, each in different ways of analyzing an utterance.
      - thaumasiotes 11y ago
        "Some" is a perfect counterpart to "the", expressing only indefiniteness (regardless of noun number) where "the" expresses only definiteness: There's some guy out on the sidewalk erasing the chalk art. It's more common to use "a" there, but not required. Here are two English sentences in which a word appears solely to satisfy English syntactic requirements: Your house is big. It's raining outside. While interesting, those sentences aren't arguments that "is" is not a verb, or that "it" is not a noun.
- escherplex 11y ago
  Good observations. It's also interesting to look back 2K years at the kingpin Eurasian languages for evidence of definite/indefinite articles. From right to left, ancient Chinese (probably) lacked the qualifier but was exposed to its existence via the silk road (which used the lingua franca Aramaic which had them) and also through exposure to the Greek Buddhist colonies in North India (ancient Greek had a definite article). Same holds for Sanskrit in ancient India, which lacks any definite article. Same for old Latin. And Greece was subordinate to Rome, which only tolerated Greek as a language of the intelligentsia. Curious how an appendage in ancient secondary tongues became so mainstream in so many dominant contemporary languages.
  - cafard 11y ago
    In Homeric Greek, the definite article is more of a demonstrative adjective, isn't it, more "that man" rather than "the man"? And Greek hung on as the language of administration in the eastern part of the empire.
    - escherplex 11y ago
      True. The Wikipedia page on 'Article (grammar)' brings up the same points. Meanwhile, back in Greece,the European Union, and the OXIclean vote (a stain remover product in the US :) ...
lnanek2 11y ago
There's several cases in Chinese where you just have to add a da or some other meaningless word just to get things to sound the correct way with the right number of syllables and word spacing, however. The rules are different, but it's effectively just as useless but still required to talk correctly.
kwhitefoot 11y ago
In British English your two university examples mean different things. 'I am going to university' means that I will study at some unspecified university, but 'I am going to the university' means I am going to travel to a specific, presumably already mentioned, university or even more likely to the nearest one. The first would be said by a student while the second by someone who works at a university (lecturer, secretary, cleaner, jobbing builder, etc.). Similarly 'I am going to shop' and 'I am going to the shop'.
- escherplex 11y ago
  Written from the vantage point of a good RP education. Unfortunately in US 'going to shop' out of context would elicit the question 'where?' taking 'to shop' as an infinitive and not as an activity venue.
  - kwhitefoot 11y ago
    :-) Yes, I had a good education. My wife often points out when I am lamenting the current state of education that I was lucky enough to go to very good schools in the sixties and that education even then was also pretty bad if you were unlucky, lived in a rural area, deprived inner city, etc. Anyway, back to my poorly made point: I think that the example sentences show that even 'educated' British and American English are in many ways quite distinct dialects.

philsnow 11y ago

They're determiners (part of determiner phrases, like "the", "some", "a", "all", "many", "most", "85% of", "at least seven", etc). They don't function exactly like adjectives. Noun phrases need determiners on them or they feel ungrammatical. "Dog kicked ball" is ungrammatical whereas "the dog kicked a ball" is fine. "Red dog kicked blue ball" is plausible only when "red dog" and "blue ball" are considered proper nouns (meaning the phrase "red dog" denotes a particular dog in the context). Proper nouns like George Washington don't need a determiner.

peterfirefly 11y ago
> Noun phrases need determiners on them or they feel ungrammatical. Nature abhors a vacuum. One giant leap for mankind. The rules for when articles can/must be left out are quite complicated :(
- philsnow 11y ago
  Read on: > Proper nouns like George Washington don't need a determiner. "Nature" is a proper noun (there is, after all, only one.). "One" is a determiner. "mankind" is a proper noun. Absolutely agree that, in colloquial English, the rules for when articles / determiners (and any other part of speech really) can be elided are complicated. I quite routinely ask people "time is it", leaving out the "what".
  - peterfirefly 11y ago
    Nature is a proper noun? Okay, I'll grant you Nature, Science, Communism, and Christendom. But mankind, too? Really? Change, too? ("Change (abstract noun) is hard." vs "The change (menopause) is hard.") I chose the "One giant leap for mankind" example not because I didn't know that "one" is a determiner but because "one" and "a[n]" usually can't substitute for each other (with the usual complicated rules). Danish doesn't have this distinction at all, using the same two words for the cardinal number and the indeterminate article. I guess my point really was that determiners are hard -- and calling them adjectives doesn't help.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    No, mankind is not a proper noun. It's a mass noun, like sand, iron, or snow. Mass nouns and plural nouns don't necessarily need determiners, depending on how you're using them.

mikekchar 11y ago

Generally speaking, "the" needs to be interpretted from the speaker's point of view. Saying "I went to a store" implies that I had a wide choice of stores. Saying "I went to the store" implies that I didn't choose which store I went to. It's the store that I usually go to when I buy things. It doesn't necessarily mean that the listener knows which store I went to, or that there is only one store. Conversely, if I say, "I ate the peach" then I am inferring that there was something special about the peach which would imply that you should know about it. Why is it different from a store? Because I don't routinely eat the same peach every day/week. I don't have a default choice. Yes, I taught English as a foreign language for 5 years. It's interesting that native English speakers who speak perfectly don't actually know how this works. Even after the amount of thought and study I put into it, I'm willing to bet that I don't have it 100% right. If anybody is studying a second language, this is a big hint about what you should not be studying ;-) You can get some things almost completely wrong and it will be fine most of the time. Eventually, after you are corrected 10,000 times you will use it without thinking about it.

SilasX 11y ago
>Generally speaking, "the" needs to be interpretted from the speaker's point of view. Saying "I went to a store" implies that I had a wide choice of stores. Saying "I went to the store" implies that I didn't choose which store I went to. It's the store that I usually go to when I buy things. It doesn't necessarily mean that the listener knows which store I went to, or that there is only one store. I think we agree but are labeling it different. I meant the "listener knowledge" broadly -- you seem to agree that using "the" requires some understanding on the listener's part that there's something that narrows down which store and makes it definite, even if it's not enough for them to pick it out. In this case, that the listener somehow knows that there is some store you must be thinking of. But the "store" usage still seems to break this: people use it even there's no reason for the list to believe the speaker is thusly restricted!

vorg 11y ago
> Here are two English sentences in which a word appears solely to satisfy English syntactic requirements Not sure how that relates to what I'm saying about "the". A minor note: the "is" in "Your house is big" is non-contractable, whereas in "It's raining outside" the "is" contracts, so they're really 2 different words.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  The "is" in "your house is big" is not non-contractable, as can be seen here: It's big. What are you saying about "the"? There are lots of words with essentially no (in the case of "it's raining", literally no) semantic content; they belong to various parts of speech just the same. EDIT: I want to also bring two more examples of "the" in English to your attention. The first was recently produced by me: > It's a famous result that the people who believe premarital sex is wrong account for fairly little of the premarital sex. "The premarital sex" has basically the same semantics as "all premarital sex", and the use of "the" is required for that effect. Here's the second: > In considering India it must always be borne in mind that here was the original seat of the Aryan civilization and that, though the Hindoo is as dark as many of the American negroes, he is of Aryan stock like ourselves. ( http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27233/27233-h/27233-h.htm http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27233/27233-h/27233-h.htm ) Again, "the Hindoo" uses a "the" that cannot be interpreted anaphorically, and the noun phrase is in fact not linked to anything prior. It appears in the context already marked for definiteness.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    To pre-empt a potential reply: you can make the fact that the "is" of "your house is big" contracts freely even more stupid-obvious like so: Your dog's big. If it did contract in "your house is big", it would have exactly the same pronunciation, so there's not really much grounds to say it isn't contracted even in that specific sentence.
    - vorg 11y ago
      Looks like "your house is big" doesn't contract because the voiced "is" becomes unvoiced "-s" when contracting, and two unvoiced "s" sounds don't join together.
  - vorg 11y ago
    > There are lots of words with essentially no semantic content; they belong to various parts of speech just the same I said "the" is solely a cohesive device, independent of the semantics and in the domain of thematics, so "a" and "the" are used orthogonally. I also said if "part of speech" is defined as being in the grammatical structure of languages, then "the" doesn't have a part of speech -- I was reinforcing the first point I made. All your arguments have only made some point which is tangential to what you've replied to. Linguists don't use the term "part of speech" anymore anyway, they instead define "word class". As for "the premarital sex" and "the Hindoo", you're creating an implied prior context when you use "the" instead of a regular form such as "all premarital sex" and "Hindoos". The "the" overlays onto the "all", "-s", or "a" to change the grammatical structure.
    - thaumasiotes 11y ago
      But "a" and "the" aren't used orthogonally -- they interfere with each other. They participate in the grammatical structure of English in exactly the same way. If you want a more focused reply, I need you to explain what you're talking about at greater length. As to "your house is big": you said > Looks like "your house is big" doesn't contract because the voiced "is" becomes unvoiced "-s" when contracting This isn't true. Just look at the followup I gave, "your dog's big". By analogy to the verb suffixes -s and -ed (and the clitic genitive particle 's), we can see that voiced "is" /ɪz/ would contract to [əz] (still a full syllable), not [s], when following "house". As it's pronounced that way anyway, investigation is pretty futile.
      - vorg 11y ago
        > But "a" and "the" aren't used orthogonally -- they interfere with each other. The semantic "a" and thematic "the" don't interfere with each other, and can be taught separately. Perhaps you're thinking of their influence on the end grammar of the sentence. > They participate in the grammatical structure of English in exactly the same way. Not exactly the same. As I said above, the "the" overlays onto the grammatical structure after the "a" does. > If you want a more focused reply, I need you to explain what you're talking about at greater length. What makes you think I want your replies? I never replied to you initially.