| Part of a series on |
| Linguistics |
|---|
 Portal |
A nominalized adjective is an adjective that has undergone nominalization, and is thus used as a noun. In the rich and the poor, the adjectives rich and poor function as nouns denoting people who are rich and poor respectively.
The most common appearance of the nominalized adjective in English is when an adjective is used to indicate a collective group. This happens in the case where a phrase such as the poor people becomes the poor. The adjective poor is nominalized, and the noun people disappears. Other adjectives commonly used in this way include rich, wealthy, homeless, disabled , blind, deaf, etc., as well as certain demonyms such as English, Welsh, Irish, French, Dutch.
Another case is when an adjective is used to denote a single object with the property, as in "you take the long route, and I'll take the short". Here the short stands for "the short route". A much more common alternative in the modern language is the structure using the prop-word one: "the short one". However, the use of the adjective alone is fairly common in the case of superlatives such as biggest, ordinal numbers such as first, second, etc., and other related words such as next and last.
Many adjectives, though, have undergone conversion so that they can be used regularly as countable nouns; examples include Catholic, Protestant, red (with various meanings), green, etc.
Nominal uses of adjectives have been found to have become less common as the language developed from Old English to Middle English and then Modern English. The following table shows the frequency of such uses in different stages of the language: [1]
| Period | Early OE (to 950) | Late OE (950–1150) | Early ME (1150–1350) | Late ME (1350–1500) | 1500–1570 | 1570–1640 | 1640–1710 |
| Frequency of adjectives used as nouns (per 100,000 words) | 316.7 | 331.4 | 255.2 | 73.4 | 70.1 | 78.9 | 91.1 |
The decline in the use of adjectives as nouns may be attributed to the loss of adjectival inflection throughout Middle English. In line with the Minimalist Framework elaborated by Noam Chomsky, [2] it is suggested that inflected adjectives are more likely to be nominalized because they have overtly-marked φ-features (such as grammatical number and gender), which makes them suitable for use as the complement of a determiner.
Determiners with unvalued φ-features must find a complement with a valued φ-feature to meet semantic comprehension. [1] In the diagrams below, the determiner is the, and its complement is either the noun phrase poor people or the nominalized adjective poor.
The capacity of adjectives to be used as nouns is sometimes exploited in puns like The poor rich.
As the frequency of nominalized adjective use decreased, the frequency of structures using the prop-word one increased (phrases such as "the large" were replaced by those of the type "the large one"). In most other languages, there is no comparable prop-word, and nominalized adjectives, which in many cases retain inflectional endings, have remained more common.
Adjectives in German change their form for various features, such as case and gender, and so agree with the noun that they modify. The adjective alt (old), for example, develops a separate lexical entry that carries the morphological and syntactic requirements of the head noun that has been removed: [3] the requirements are the inflectional endings of the language.
der
the.NOM.SG.MASC
Alt-e
old-NOM.SG.MASC
'the old man' (Sadock 1991)
den
the.ACC.SG.MASC
Alt-en
old-ACC.SG.MASC
'the old man' (Sadock 1991)
Here, der Alte is inflected for masculine gender, singular number and nominative case. [4] Den Alten is a similar inflection but in the accusative case. The nominalized adjective is derived from the adjective alt and surfaces as it does by taking the appropriate inflection. [3]
Like in English, adjectival nouns are used as a plural definite ("the unemployed") and with nationality words ("the Swedish"). However, Swedish does not require "one or ones" with count nouns ("The old cat is slower than the new (one)"). The use of inflection, which incorporates the number and the gender of the noun, allows Swedish to avoid the need for a visible noun to describe a noun. That is also true in inflecting adjectival nouns. [5]
A noun phrase with both the noun and the adjective.[ dubious ]
A noun phrase with only the adjectival noun.[ dubious ]
Ancient Greek uses nominalized adjectives without a "dummy" or generic noun like English "one(s)" or "thing(s)". [6] The adjective that modifies the noun carries information about gender, number and case and so can entirely replace the noun.
πολλαί
many.FEM.NOM.PL
"many women" (Balme & Lawall 2003) or "many things (of feminine gender)"
καλόν
beautiful.NEUT.NOM.SG
"a beautiful thing" or "a beautiful one"
τὸ
the.NEUT.NOM.SG
καλόν
beautiful.NEUT.NOM.SG
"the beautiful thing" or "the beautiful one"
In Russian, the conversion (or zero derivation) process of an adjective becoming a noun is the only type of conversion that is allowed. The process functions as a critical means of addition to the open class category of nouns.
Of all Slavic languages, Russian is the one that uses the attributive nouns the most. When the adjective is nominalized, the adjectival inflection alone expresses case, number and gender, and the noun is omitted. [7] For example, the Russian phrase «приёмная комната» (priyomnaya komnata, "receiving room") becomes «приёмная» (priyomnaya, "reception room"). The adjective "receiving" takes the nominal from "reception" and replaces the noun "room".
Many adjectival nouns in Russian serve to create nouns. Those common forms of nouns are known as "deleted nouns"; and there are three types:
The first type occurs in the specific context within a sentence or phrase and refers to the original noun that it describes. For example, in the sentence "Tall trees are older than short" the adjective "short" has become a noun and is assumed to mean "the short ones". Such a derivation is contextually sensitive to the lexical meaning of the phrase of which it is part.
The content-specific use of adjectival nouns also occurs in the second type in which nouns can be deleted, or assumed, in colloquial expressions. For example, in Russian, one might say «встречный» "oncoming" to refer to: 1) «встречный ветер» — headwind; 2) «встречный поезд» — train coming from the opposite direction; 3) «встречный план» — counter-plan; 4) «встречный иск» — counter-claim.
The third type is known as the "permanent" adjectival noun and has an adjective that stands alone as a noun. Such adjectives have become nouns over time, and most speakers are aware of their implicit adjectival meaning. For example, «прилагательное» (lit. "something, that apply something else") — the adjective.
Nominalized adjectives occur frequently in both Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic. An example would be الإسلاميةal-ʾislāmiyyah "things (that are) Islamic", which is derived from the adjective إسلاميʾislāmī "Islamic" in the inanimate plural inflection.
Another example would be الكبيرal-kabīr "the big one" (said of a person or thing of masculine gender), from كبيرkabīr "big" inflected in the masculine singular.
In grammar, the dative case is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "Maria Jacobo potum dedit", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob a drink". In this example, the dative marks what would be considered the indirect object of a verb in English.
An adjective is a word that describes a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
Suffixaufnahme, also known as case stacking, is a linguistic phenomenon used in forming a genitive construction, whereby prototypically a genitive noun agrees with its head noun. The term Suffixaufnahme itself is literally translated as "taking up of suffixes", which can be interpreted as the identical case marking of different but referentially-related phrases, with the presumption that nominal phrases possess a flat or non-configurational syntax. Across syntactic theories, case is seen as a bundle of features, and case agreement as the identity of case features. It was first recognized in Old Georgian and some other Caucasian and ancient Middle Eastern languages as well as many Australian languages, and almost invariably coincides with agglutinativity.
A possessive or ktetic form is a word or grammatical construction indicating a relationship of possession in a broad sense. This can include strict ownership, or a number of other types of relation to a greater or lesser degree analogous to it.
Mbula is an Austronesian language spoken by around 2,500 people on Umboi Island and Sakar Island in the Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea. Its basic word order is subject–verb–object; it has a nominative–accusative case-marking strategy.
Standard Romanian shares largely the same grammar and most of the vocabulary and phonological processes with the other three surviving varieties of Balkan Romance, namely Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian.
In linguistics, especially within generative grammar, phi features are the morphological expression of a semantic process in which a word or morpheme varies with the form of another word or phrase in the same sentence. This variation can include person, number, gender, and case, as encoded in pronominal agreement with nouns and pronouns. Several other features are included in the set of phi-features, such as the categorical features ±N (nominal) and ±V (verbal), which can be used to describe lexical categories and case features.
In linguistics, an unaccusative verb is an intransitive verb whose grammatical subject is not a semantic agent. In other words, the subject does not actively initiate, or is not actively responsible for, the action expressed by the verb. An unaccusative verb's subject is semantically similar to the direct object of a transitive verb or to the subject of a verb in the passive voice.
The grammar of Old English is quite different from that of Modern English, predominantly by being much more inflected. As an old Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system that is similar to that of the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as the umlaut.
Hindustani, the lingua franca of Northern India and Pakistan, has two standardised registers: Hindi and Urdu. Grammatical differences between the two standards are minor but each uses its own script: Hindi uses Devanagari while Urdu uses an extended form of the Perso-Arabic script, typically in the Nastaʿlīq style.
German adjectives come before the noun, as in English, and are usually not capitalized. However, as in French and other Indo-European languages, they are inflected when they come before a noun. That is, they take an ending that depends on the gender, case, and number of the noun phrase.
This article describes the grammar of the Scottish Gaelic language.
The Lithuanian language's declension system is similar to declension systems in ancient Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit, Latin or Ancient Greek. It is one of the most complicated declension systems among modern Indo-European and modern European languages.
The grammar of the Marathi language shares similarities with other modern Indo-Aryan languages such as Odia, Gujarati or Punjabi. The first modern book exclusively about the grammar of Marathi was printed in 1805 by Willam Carey.
Scrambling is a syntactic phenomenon wherein sentences can be formulated using a variety of different word orders without any change in meaning. Scrambling often results in a discontinuity since the scrambled expression can end up at a distance from its head. Scrambling does not occur in English, but it is frequent in languages with freer word order, such as German, Russian, Persian and Turkic languages. The term was coined by Haj Ross in his 1967 dissertation and is widely used in present work, particularly with the generative tradition.
Gothic is an inflected language, and as such its nouns, pronouns, and adjectives must be declined in order to serve a grammatical function. A set of declined forms of the same word pattern is called a declension. There are five grammatical cases in Gothic with a few traces of an old sixth instrumental case.
Faroese grammar is related and very similar to that of Icelandic. Faroese is an inflected language with three grammatical genders and four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive.
In linguistic morphology, inflection is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles, etc., as declension.
In grammar, a genitive construction or genitival construction is a type of grammatical construction used to express a relation between two nouns such as the possession of one by another, or some other type of connection. A genitive construction involves two nouns, the head and the dependent. In dependent-marking languages, a dependent genitive noun modifies the head by expressing some property of it. For example, in the construction "John's jacket", "jacket" is the head and "John's" is the modifier, expressing a property of the jacket. The analogous relationship in head-marking languages is pertensive.
English nouns form the largest category of words in English, both in terms of the number of different words and in terms of how often they are used in typical texts. The three main categories of English nouns are common nouns, proper nouns, and pronouns. A defining feature of English nouns is their ability to inflect for number, as through the plural –s morpheme. English nouns primarily function as the heads of noun phrases, which prototypically function at the clause level as subjects, objects, and predicative complements. These phrases are the only English phrases whose structure includes determinatives and predeterminatives, which add abstract specifying meaning such as definiteness and proximity. Like nouns in general, English nouns typically denote physical objects, but they also denote actions, characteristics, relations in space, and just about anything at all. Taken all together, these features separate English nouns from the language's other lexical categories, such as adjectives and verbs.