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Playing tennis is a lot of fun.

Is this a structure of [adjective: a lot of][noun: fun] or [adverb: a lot of][adjective: fun]?

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3 Answers 3

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The ‘Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English’ describes a lot of as a quantifying determiner. That makes the structure of your example [determiner: a lot of] [noun: fun].

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In that sentence, fun is a noun.

Informally, fun can also be a verb ("They are just funning you.") or an adjective ("It was a fun evening."), but this is not the case there.

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Fun is a noun. There are many derivatives of the word. Funny is a proper adjective. Funster is someone who likes to have a good time. Fun as a verb goes into the same basket with office and movie both of which are convenient shorthand for people too lazy to put together a proper sentence. Fun as an adjective, along with "funner" and "funnest" create for me, as well as other educated people I know, an effect similar to fingernails on a blackboard. But for most people, they could (sic) care less.

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  • So "Bridge is a fun game." would be expressed how by so-called educated people?
    – ColleenV
    Commented Jan 5, 2018 at 1:17
  • I'm morbidly curious where you could ever have seen someone talking about "officing" or "movieing". Commented Jan 5, 2018 at 2:25
  • Go into Office Max on a Saturday morning and hang out at the stationery department. Commented Feb 18, 2018 at 19:49

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