So frustrated

I admire your patience.

If I may highjack your rant about people listening to your expert opinion to ask you expert opinion on a related matter . . .

After the recent LL post, I checked 11C and saw that "woman" is listed as an adjective (as in the phrase "woman president"). But it doesn't fit the criteria for adjectivehood you're describing. Is there something else, or is MW just behind the times?

It's perhaps complicated. 11C actually lists "woman" as an adjective without explanation, as just part of the noun entry. (At least, in the online version.) The Third New International (again, the online version) does have a separate entry (where the boldface here represents references to those words as entries):

1 : of, belonging to, or characteristic of a woman : womanly <woman talk> <woman clothes>
2 : female <a woman doctor> <woman students> <memorable woman characters of world literature -- Tomorrow>

So why is that? Perhaps because "woman" is somewhat ubiquitous in this sense (and I always find it slightly odd; for "Argentina's first woman president", I'd prefer "Argentina's first female president", and for "woman doctor", I'd prefer "doctor"), so it warrants some kind of entry. Perhaps because "woman" is actually much more adjectival in a phrase like "woman president" than "chicken" is in "chicken soup"--genuinely synonymous with "female" in a way that "chicken" doesn't stand in for some kind of adjective?

Or, perhaps, because even the best dictionaries can be terribly flawed, and this is most notable in parts of speech. I've complained before (where was that? mailing list? I wish I'd saved it) about the way MW uses "adverb" as "whatever the hell else": its definition of "adverb", in fact, reads "...a modifier of a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a preposition, a phrase, a clause, or a sentence, expressing some relation of manner or quality, place, time, degree, number, cause, opposition, affirmation, or denial, and in English also serving to connect and to express comment on clause content". Which is to say: "Stuff". ("Yes" is an adverb? "Up" is an adverb in "button up your coat"?) Similarly, I once lamented the fact that both "former" and "snafu" are listed as adjectives, though one of them can only come before nouns (the former senator vs. *a snafu situation) and one of them can only be used predicatively (*that senator is former vs. this situation is snafu). In some sense, they're both adjectives; but in another, very real sense, they're quite distinct in their syntactic categories. So when it comes to calling "woman" an adjective, I'm perfectly willing to believe it's simply an error caused by a certain necessary oversimplification.

I was thinking about this one on the way to work this morning. It's interesting when you are an expert in a field in what you have to say about that field is incredibly counterintuitive to laypeople. For example, say I wanted to say that Dumbledore being gay is actually extremely reactionary and creates a hostile environment for gay readers. (This is a bad example, because it sounds like your adjective/noun thing is accepted by all linguists, whereas if there's anything the last few weeks on childlit show, it's that incredibly smart children's literature become morons when jkr is involved. But let's run with it.)

If I were to say that in a layman's environment, I would expect everyone to start arguing with me. I would expect people to say no, no, look how wonderful it is, and look at this individual reader and how great it was for them, and look, queer characters in fantasy, here's this essay I read in Salon about how powerful those are for children, anecdote anecdote anecdote.

So then I would have to support my assertion with evidence. And I would start talking about the history of homosexuality in children's literature, and how for 40 years homosexual characters in children's literature are not condemned in themselves, but how their homosexual acts -- even if limited to kissing or handholding -- always result in external, real-world tragic consequences: dogs being hit by cars, the Mississippi flooding and destroying a town, teachers getting fired, the love interest becoming a genocidal maniac who tries to destroy the world. I would show the arc of this development over the last four decades, and show how it has, especially in the last 10 years, stopped happening. I would show how gay characters are now allowed to be gay, and while they may be punished by homophobic members of their own society, that is different from real-world tragic consequences. And I would support this with evidence and linking to various experts talking about it.

And THAT'S the point where I would expect people to start yielding to my expertise. Not because I have a degree that says I'm right, but because I have use the education I obtained in getting that degree to support my assertion.

So the first few lines of your quoted above dialogue? Those seem completely reasonable to me. It's the last few lines, after you support it, that get my goat.

As edited in above: yes, that. (I shouldn't have given the impression that the first few comments were themselves inherently irritating, except in the usual way that "English is dead" is irritating--see the previous post, and various LanguageLog posts on The Recency Effect, and so forth. But sure, people'll think that. It was the rest of it that I found so frustrating.)

I'd like to think that my professionally-trained opinion should carry perhaps somewhat more weight than the vague thoughts of a college student somewhere.

I think you put your finger on it right at the beginning of that sentence: you like to think. Most people, not so much with the thinking.

It might be at least close to true that no one listens to experts unless they agree with what the expert says. One day at the dinner table my nephew, a college student at the time, said something about maybe becoming a scientist. My brother and I, both with PhDs in science/engineering, suggested that he would need to know at least a little about programming. My nephew disagreed, basing his opinion, I suppose, on his vastly greater knowledge of what it takes to be a scientist.

I love the fact that they misspelled Pullum's name. Not because it says much, just because _everyone_ misspells his name. :)

It seems to me that a large part of the problem (in this particular exchange, but also in many others) is that linguists use the term "adjective" in a technical sense which is at odds with the way the general public uses the term. Speaking for myself, I learned in junior high that the "comfort" in "comfort food" was an adjective because the *definition* of adjective was "a word or phrase which modifies a noun," which "comfort" clearly is in this context. If you want to argue--and I would suppose that you do--that this definition of adjective is not a particularly useful one in the study of linguistics, I am perfectly happy to defer to your expert opinion. But that still doesn't change the way *I* use the word "adjective" any more than the fact that botanists consider the tomato a "fruit" changes the fact that it is *not* a fruit in the sense that I normally use the word in everyday language.

Hi! I popped in here via Language Log (your open letter totally rocks btw), and am now just a bit confused...

Even if comfort is a noun, isn't it acting adjectivally in the phrase "comfort food"? I take your point that it has no comparative or superlative form of adjectives, but in this usage it also lacks the plural form of nouns - no one would say "comforts food." (Would they?)

So now I'm curious: aside from nomenclature, is there a technical difference between a true adjective and a noun used adjectivally? What would the latter be called?

Even if comfort is a noun, isn't it acting adjectivally in the phrase "comfort food"?

Yes, this is a case where one can argue that a noun is being used in a function similar to that of an adjective; the noun is modifying another noun. However, there are also a number of important differences between comfort food (which we call a "noun-noun compound" and phrases like tasty food or alleged food, with nouns modifed by true adjectives:

• In the true adjective phrase, the meaning of the phrase can generally be inferred from the meaning of the adjective and the noun being modified. Tasty food is food that is tasty; alleged food is some thing that somebody alleges is food.
  
  
• In noun-noun compounds, however, this is not the case generally. The meaning of the phrase can usually not be predicted on the basis of just the two nouns and the way they're combined. The meaning of comfort food can't be accurately rendered as "food that is comfort"; the compound really means something like "food that provides comfort to people who eat it, because it is the sort of simple foods that they associate with their formative years." We can argue that not every food that makes some person comfortable at some given time counts as comfort food. (Another example: does the meaning of bottle opener encompass sabers used to open bottles of Champagne? What about anthropomorphic bottle-shaped cartoon characters who open doors for people?)
  
  
• Linguists make a distinction between what I will call listed items vs. inferred items (other terms are often used for this distinction). A listed item is a word or phrase that, to put it simply, is learned and memorized as a whole; an inferred item is one that is not learned whole, but rather, composed during speech performance from listed parts by application of grammar rules. Understanding the meaning of a listed item is a memory task; you have to know the meaning beforehand, and you have to retrieve it from memory. Understanding the meaning of an inferred item requires you to recognize the rules according to which it was formed, the listed items that participate in it, and how the interaction of those determines the meaning of the whole phrase.
  

  Cases where an adjective modifies a noun are ususally inferred items. Noun-noun compounds, on the other hand, are commonly listed items, because they are usually combinations whose meaning must be learned, and can't be fully inferred from the meaning of the parts.
  
  

• And of course, there are the other reasons, the ones that cqs brings up, which have to do with the criteria that linguists use to divide words into word classes. In English, nouns inflect for number, while adjectives inflect for degree. Comfort inflects for number, and not for degree. Tasty inflects for degree, not number.
  

Is Green a noun or an adjective?

1. "I have a green coat."
2. "Green is the color of my coat."

Are you suggesting that in No. 1 "green" is a noun?
Do you say that "green," in No. 2 is an adjective?

I'd love to hear how you classify "happening" as in "This is a happening place!"

BTW - I'm an "expert," too. You and Mr. Pullum are entitled to your opinions, no matter how wrong they are.

Re: Is Green a noun or an adjective?

I'm in no way suggesting that "green" in (1) is a noun. I'm perfectly happy to accept that some words, such as "green", are ambiguous; that they can be used as both adjectives and nouns. (After all, "green" in (1) can be used comparatively, can be modified with an adverb, etc.; and "green" in (2), or variations of it, can be used with nominal morphology, e.g. "my coat is composed of greens and blues, including this lovely green here".)

I'm only suggesting that, while some words are ambiguous, not all of them are. The fact that "green" can be both an adjective and a noun doesn't mean that "comfort" can be. It means that we should consider whether "comfort" can be; and then we can discover that, unlike "green", it cannot.

("Happening", in "this is a happening place!", is clearly an adjective. Again, I have no problem with that.)

Adjective?

The test frame for an adjective is this. Let's suppose we want to test some word for being an adjective in a particular situation. Let's represent the word in question by X.

(The) X (noun) is very X. If this works ok, then X is an adjective. If not, it is not.

For example: The red tomato is very red. That works. The supermarket tomato is very supermarket. That does not work. So "red" in the first example is an adjective, while "supermarket" in the second is not an adjective.

There are grammatical terms for words that fit in places like the "supermarket" above, but adjective is not one of those terms. (As I recall from junior high school, the word "supermarket" above is a noun adjunct, but since junior high school was 62 years ago I may be misremembering. I'm not a linguist, just a retired chemist, but I have heard a lot of linguistic terminology over the years, since I hang around a lot with a linguist.)

REH

Re: Adjective?

Yeah, though this only works up to a point. "The former senator is very former", for instance. The fact that we can't say "...is very comfort" is certainly suggestive, but as a test it's not conclusive, which is why I didn't bring it up in my discussions over at the GL.

Adjective

"Adjective - Any of a class of words used to modify a noun or other substantive by limiting, qualifying, or specifying." The American heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition (1982) (sorry, I guess I need a new dictionary)

Read this carefully. Under this definition, it is the use of the word which determines its nature.

"Comfort food" is idiomatic, but is generally recognized to have a certain meaning. It is a food which comforts. Thus, we see that it is actually the verb form of the word which is being used to modify food, not the noun form. But under the above definition, it doesn't matter. It is the usage of the word, not its customary form, which governs its nature.

Re: Adjective

You're making a mistake here which I attempted to clarify in one of my posts over at the GL. It's true that an adjective is a word used to modify a noun; but that doesn't mean that a word used to modify a noun is an adjective. That's like saying that, because a prime number greater than two must be odd, therefore an odd number greater than two must be prime.

That same dictionary--well, its fourth edition, in the form available at bartleby.com--defines horse as "A large hoofed mammal...having a short-haired coat, a long mane, and a long tail"; but that doesn't mean that every short-haired, long-maned, long-tailed, hoofed mammal is a horse. Some of them are donkeys, some of them are zebras. What you have here, in "comfort", is not a horse, even though it seems to match the definition; it's a zebra.

Re: Adjective

When you say:

'"Comfort food" is idiomatic, but is generally recognized to have a certain meaning. It is a food which comforts.'

that's a very en-US take on the expression. In en-UK it feels more like, "It is a food which offers comfort." Besides, if it were, "a food which comforts", we'd say "It's a comforting food."

Please, folks, I beg you, when an expert says "you have to believe me 'cause I'm all experty", maintain a healthy skepticism. But when an expert says "Here's what I think, based on my expertise, with supporting arguments formed with the facts and methods that I learned in the pursuit of this expertise": that's when you should please-I-beg-you listen.

I'd like an exception, please, for paid expert witnesses on the other side of a litigation. Because, man, they'll say *anything*.

Otherwise, well done!

Again another reader of your blog through the proxy that is LL.

I don't think I've ever agreed with PUllum or LL on this issue until this post actually. You brought it into focus.

I think the question here isn't whether there is a difference between the definition used by the layman and the definition used by someone in the field of linguistics.

It is more that the layman's definition has faultily become much shorter than the original definition.

I can't say if this (the layman's definition) will become the actual definition in the future due to popularity but it is definitely an issue worth taking note of.

My basic point is the layman's definition of an adjective has just become "anything (X) that modifies a noun (Y)" rather than "a class of X that modifies a Y through limitation, qualification, or specificity."
~

I think that is where the argument lies rather than just a "i said it isn't an adjective, and he said it is an adjective" situation.
~

PS - would you mind if I add you to my friends list as you seem to post interesting and thought-provoking posts.

Sure, feel free to add me to your friends list! (I'm currently working on a post that covers some of what you say here.)

Personally, i've always felt that, since English is strongly positional, a word like "chicken" in "chicken soup" is at least functionally an adjective when used in the place where an adjective would be expected.

The "problem" (if it is one) is that English has (in the words of John Lawler) been shedding its inflections like a snake sheds its skin ever since the Great Vowel Shift. In most Indo-European lanuages you can look at a word and *know* what part of speech it is. Adjectives have adjectival endings, nouns nominal ones, verbs verbal ones, and so on. But English is barely inflectional any more. What is "table"? What is "green"? What is "stable"? What is "police"? What is "arm"? What is "it", for that matter? And on and on.

The vocabulary for talking about parts of speech falters when it meets a word like "green", which can be noun, verb, or adjective depending on the context.

But still, some words are not adjectives. English permits noun-noun modification, and a word like "comfort" meets no test of adjective *beside* being able to modify a noun attributively, and that's not solely an adjectival function. We do better in English to talk of "adjectivals" and "adverbials" than "adjectives" and "adverbs" in many cases. Or so I see it, anyway.

Yes, and the other side of this (and, partly, what makes it possible), is that, in spite of foreign learners' agonised protests about phrasal verbs (and superfluous subordinate clauses, of course), English, largely through its Germanic roots, has also dispensed with a shed-load of prepositions and therefore revels in the multiple noun shunt.

Where does the tram stop? At the tram stop, of course: is 'tram' an adjective here?' German, being both more fussy and more Swiss Army knife (noun or adjective?), has 'Straßenbahnhaltestelle' (it's a noun), whereas Italian has "fermata dell'autobus".

Compounds

Reading this a couple of days after the activity died down, I notice that no one (in the original chat log nor this discussion) ever got really back to the initial point... that "comfort food" is a noun-noun compound. Rather than spinning off into deeper and deeper levels of "what is an adjective, anyway?" it might be better to ask if there are fairly simple rules for spotting compound nouns?

In the case of "comfort food" (or "grammar school" or "executive suite"), the mistake is in trying to insist that noun-phrases have to have a root noun that is modified by all the others. In these cases the initial nouns don't modify the following nouns, they make the phrase into a new noun that has a specific new meaning.

It seems to me the issue comes from trying to mentally do calculus on words. They want to use math like thinking to parse everything and language just doesn't work that way. In this case the initial noun isn't adding or multiplying the "value" of the following word but instead creating a new, more specific concept. Adjectives are the class of words that shift the meanings of large blocks of nouns in a like manner (red balloon, red face, red paint).

Comfort doesn't hold that role in English (right now). If, by analogy, people start building other phrases like "comfort hair", "comfort pants", "comfort toys" then it could take on the role but right now it doesn't fit the bill.

In short, it is a noun because it is already a noun and it doesn't have an adjective function, yet. This thinking, in math terms, is a variant of Occam's razor, it is simpler to keep calling it a noun than make it yet another exception to the adjective class just because of a single idiomatic phrase.