51–60 of 99 posts
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"brick grey ancient barn" is grammatically correct if you assume "brick grey" is a color, but of course that's probably not what it's supposed to mean.
Indeed! Although I'd argue that probably is what it's supposed to mean. A "leather horse saddle" and a "horse leather saddle" are very different things, and no native English speaker would mix them up. You know which they mean.
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As the article points out, it's not really "wrong" to say "the" is an adjective: it functions exactly like one! It's only wrong in the sense of violating one of two equally useful classification systems. And this error doesn't even bubble up to the level of miscommunication, the only real sense in which you can say someone's usage is incorrect! Remember, in everyday use, you don't directly observe word classification…
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 noun…
Nature abhors a vacuum. One giant leap for mankind.
The rules for when articles can/must be left out are quite complicated :(
This was resolved years ago in the linguistics community. There are open-class words, which in English are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. New open-class words can easily be added to the language. There are closed-class words, about a hundred of them, although opinions differ on this.[1] Some lists have "the" as a closed-class word, others have it as an an adverb. Closed-class words are treated like keywords i…
(This is all from chomsky's x-bar theory [0], which dates back to the 60s. I'm not aware of another model of syntax that better captures reality, but I'd love to hear about such.)
So the class of determiners is probably closed, but the class of determiner phrases is not (because phrases like "fewer than five of", "fewer than six of", etc are "generative" i.e. you can generate as many as you like).
I could absolutely conceive of a situation where a certain determiner phrase gets used so much in a community that an abbreviation becomes accepted as a new determiner. Perhaps parliamentary procedure buffs, who (say) care about 2/3s majority just as much as simple majority ("most"), come up with "tooths" meaning "at least two thirds of", and it becomes accepted as jargon within that community. Could totally see it happening. In fact, if anybody knows of any such instances I'd love to hear about them.
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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'…
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 orde…
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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 noun…
> 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 :(
> 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".
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"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…
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".
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> 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 :(
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".
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.
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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'…
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 orde…
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Climate science, evolutionary biology, ...
I actually think this comparison is quite apt. Like those others, the science of linguistics has become heavily politicized in the US, most notably regarding the validity of AAVE as a first language. Though I'd still argue linguistics has it worse. You don't really expect people in educated society to get into heated arguments with the 10-day weather forecast, or jump in to correct your "biology mistakes" while you'r…
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"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…
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".