Timeline for Is a word by default a verb or noun, or does it not work like that?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
7 events
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| Jan 8, 2021 at 21:16 | history | migrated | from english.stackexchange.com (revisions) | ||
| Dec 31, 2020 at 17:30 | comment | added | Knotwood V | @BillJ I think I understand what your saying, I was just hoping for some material I could read more upon. , but what about words that occupy both states? like book or design ? | |
| Dec 31, 2020 at 17:19 | comment | added | BillJ | @KnotwoodV Another test: Compare “a sleeping child” (verb) and “an entertaining show” (adjective). “Entertaining” differs from “sleeping” in that it can occur as complement to complex-intransitive verbs like “become”; thus we can have “It became/seemed quite entertaining” but not *“She became/seemed sleeping”. | |
| Dec 31, 2020 at 16:38 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | @Bill ... Test 1? | |
| Dec 31, 2020 at 16:38 | comment | added | Knotwood V | thank you for that, I will look into that , what's are the other tests ? | |
| Dec 31, 2020 at 16:35 | comment | added | BillJ | No: it doesn't just depend on what a word does. Noun or verb status is determined by syntactic tests. For example, if the word can be modified by "very" it must be a noun, and if it has a direct object it can only be a verb. Consider the NPs "a lovely child" and "a sleeping child". Both "lovely" and "sleeping" are modifiers of "child", but "lovely" is an adjective and "sleeping" is here a verb. See what I mean? | |
| Dec 31, 2020 at 15:47 | history | answered | Iorpim | CC BY-SA 4.0 |