Timeline for Why is "dark" an adverb in "dark blue"?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
40 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Sep 24, 2022 at 15:24 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | I'd hoped 'darker fulvous' would be the obvious string under consideration. | |
| Sep 24, 2022 at 14:35 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | @EdwinAshworth "darker browner" is not a constituent there; it's in two different phrases that just happen to be sequential. Try reading it as if it were written with a colon, not a comma. See? | |
| Sep 24, 2022 at 14:32 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | Usages like 'Race haringtoni has wing more rounded than in other races; stevensi is similar to previous but slightly darker, browner above and darker fulvous on flanks' show that [darker] [colour adjective] strings are used. | |
| Sep 23, 2022 at 21:10 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | @EdwinAshworth You can have a dark-blue sky. Now notice that although you can have a bluer sky today than yesterday ᴀɴᴅ you can have a darker sky today than yesterday, that you can ᴏɴʟʏ have a darker-blue sky today than yesterday, ɴᴇᴠᴇʀ a ❌dark-bluer sky today than yesterday. Why? Because the comparative-degree marker goes on the adjective, not on the noun. As a syntactic constituent, the unremarkable noun phrase darker blue with its adjective-plus-noun is merely a modifier of sky in its own right, but said NP is no adjective, only a modifier—as I have just proven. QED. | |
| Sep 23, 2022 at 18:30 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | Or an unfortunate example showing our POS-tagging systems are defective. You know that I consider 'modifier-of-adjective' one needed class (though admittedly dark blue is far more unary than intensely blue and certainly than startlingly blue). | |
| Sep 23, 2022 at 16:23 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | @EdwinAshworth That's an artifact of our orthography. It's really the "-ish" derivational suffix used to convert nouns to adjectives applied to the entire "(dark-yellow)" compound noun. Nothing exceptional. You have the same problem with "That red apple looks pretty un-(dark yellow) to me." | |
| Sep 23, 2022 at 16:19 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | But there are many Google hits for 'dark yellowish', and 'yellowish' is certainly never a noun. Similarly 'dark golden' .... | |
| Jul 16, 2019 at 19:51 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @Jalene The most well-suited place is a grammar (the most expansive and popular is the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL) by Pullum & Huddleston, but it’s very big and very expensive), but it can often be hard to find a section that deals with a specific use of a specific word in grammars. Sadly, there are no good reference works which list word classes, in part because word classification is a complex and unfixed matter. It would be nice if dictionaries were more reliable in this aspect, but their classifications are based on outdated models, too numerous to update now. | |
| Jul 16, 2019 at 19:38 | comment | added | Organic Heart | @JanusBahsJacquet Other than dicitonaries, can you recommend where else can I find reputable and reliable sources? | |
| Jul 16, 2019 at 15:22 | history | edited | tchrist♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 16, 2019 at 12:57 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @Jalene “Dictionaries do not list dark as an adverb” is not the same as “Dark is not an adverb”. Dictionaries don’t get to decide what word class a given word is – they’re generally not even very good at correctly reporting word classes. Any adjective that can be turned into an adverb by adding -ly can theoretically also be used as an adverb as it is (this is called a flat adverb), though there are many adjectives where it sounds quite odd to do so. | |
| Jul 16, 2019 at 12:49 | comment | added | Organic Heart | @JanusBahsJacquet Dark is not an adverb. If it is not, how can it be used as one under any circumstances? | |
| Jul 16, 2019 at 12:16 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @IlmariKaronen I haven’t encountered it, no – and as I said, I find it at the very least dubitable and jarring, borderline ungrammatical. I’m sure there’s someone, somewhere who does use dark as a flat adverb, though, which was guifa’s point: the fact that it’s not an adverb here doesn’t preclude it from possibly being one in other circumstances. | |
| Jul 16, 2019 at 12:13 | comment | added | Ilmari Karonen | @JanusBahsJacquet: Where have you encountered "laughed dark", and do you actually find it a reasonable thing to say? Because to my ear that just sounds wrong, and (even despite the increasingly common tendency in modern colloquial English to use undeclined adjectives as adverbs) definitely should be "laughed darkly". | |
| Jul 16, 2019 at 11:04 | comment | added | nick012000 | @EricWofsey "Dark bluer" isn't ungrammatical. It's the noun verb of the verb "dark bluing", where "bluing" involves using chemicals to produce a layer of altered surface properties on a metal. | |
| Jul 16, 2019 at 10:00 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @tchrist But dark is unquestionably an adverb in the somewhat less unquestionable “She turned and laughed dark at him”. In theory, flat adverbs should work fine in a context like that, but I’m struggling to find any context where dark works as a flat adverb. | |
| Jul 16, 2019 at 8:01 | vote | accept | Organic Heart | ||
| Jul 16, 2019 at 3:52 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | @guifa I figure that because cobalt is still a noun in cobalt blue, there's no way that it becomes an adverb even with a cobalt blue sky. Ditto with robins and their eggs. ;) | |
| Jul 16, 2019 at 2:20 | comment | added | user0721090601 | I mean, darkly is fine and dandy as an adverb of dark … and flat/bare adverbs are also fine and dandy, so by extension, dark is a fine and dandy adverb :-) (that's not to say it's an adverb here, just that it can be elsewhere) | |
| Jul 15, 2019 at 20:07 | comment | added | Tasos Papastylianou |
I would also add that more specifically, it is a further predicative adjective, to the predicative expression is blue, where blue here functions like some sort of hybrid between a predicative adjective and a predicative nominal. Essentially, the expanded expression would be The sky is blue [as adjective], where the blue[as noun] is dark. In the first sub-sentence, blue is a predicative adjective to 'sky', and in the second, dark is a predicative adjective to 'blue'.
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| Jul 15, 2019 at 19:57 | comment | added | Monty Harder | @tchrist I prefer to call "ruby" the first word of a compound in "ruby-red slippers", neatly sidestepping the problem. The convention of hyphenating the compound adjective helps to visually group them as a single entity much like parentheses, brackets, and braces in mathematics "(ruby red) slippers" or "{[(Bob's sister)'s neighbor]'s dog}'s dish" | |
| Jul 15, 2019 at 19:49 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | @MontyHarder I can't support calling ruby an adverb in ruby red slippers lest a fight over whose slippers are rubier red than Dorothy’s should ensue. :) | |
| Jul 15, 2019 at 19:47 | history | edited | tchrist♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 15, 2019 at 19:32 | comment | added | Monty Harder | @tchrist I don't know what point you're trying to make here with the comment about "red" and "rose". The theory that anything that modifies an adjective (or verb) is an adverb is commonly taught by grammarians. I disagree with that theory (if for no reason other than possessives, such as "Bob's sister's dog's dish", which clearly modify nouns, but are modified as if they are nouns) but the "if it modifies an adjective, it's an adverb" rule is commonly taught nevertheless. | |
| Jul 15, 2019 at 19:29 | comment | added | Barmar | "a red flower" -- "red" is an adjective. "The color of the flower is red" -- "red" is a noun. | |
| Jul 15, 2019 at 19:29 | history | edited | tchrist♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 15, 2019 at 19:26 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | @MontyHarder Just because adjectives modify nouns does not mean that all noun modifiers are adjectives. Same with adverbs modifying adjectives. If roses are red, then just because you see a red flower doesn't mean that you've just seen a rose. The logic is faulty. | |
| Jul 15, 2019 at 19:25 | comment | added | Barmar | The issue is that "dark blue" can be considered a compound noun that names a color, just like "blue-green". | |
| Jul 15, 2019 at 19:24 | history | edited | tchrist♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 15, 2019 at 19:09 | comment | added | Monty Harder | In the phrase "the dark blue sky" we clearly see that "sky" is a noun, and one interpretation is that "blue" is an adjective modifying it, so that "dark", modifying "blue" would therefore be an adverb. I would argue that it should be "the dark-blue sky" because "dark blue" is a compound, and a compound adjective should be hyphenated. Now change the word order and say "The sky is dark blue" and you have "blue as a predicate adjective, and "dark" is an adverb modifying it. Or "dark blue" is a compound as above. | |
| Jul 15, 2019 at 19:08 | comment | added | Darrel Hoffman | Another good example would be calling something sky blue (something other than the sky of course). Here the word sky, generally a noun, is used in a sort adverb-like way, but it's clearly part of the compound adjective sky blue. | |
| Jul 15, 2019 at 18:54 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | @Acccumulation My point is that dark is not an adverb here or anywhere. If it were, then you would call all kinds of things adverbs that are not: cherry red sunsets, cobalt blue skies, safety green vests, royal purple stoles, saffron yellow robes, robin's-egg blue eyes, electric pink sunglasses, and infinitely more besides. No analysis that claims the first word in each of those sets is an adverb can be trusted; they've all adjectives or nouns, not adverbs. Incredible anyone could think otherwise. | |
| Jul 15, 2019 at 18:20 | comment | added | Acccumulation | Simply because you can't grade "blue" doesn't mean it isn't an adjective. There are plenty of adjectives that are not gradable in general (e.g. *boringer), and it is not that curious that preceding a normally gradable adjective with an adverb might make it ungradable. Your position that "blue" is not an adjective becomes less defensible when, rather than it being a subject complement of a copula, it is directly modifying a noun, e.g. "Look at the dark blue sky". | |
| Jul 15, 2019 at 7:48 | comment | added | rexkogitans | Isn't it that "dark blue" is a compound? Compare to German "dunkles Blau" and "Dunkelblau". | |
| Jul 15, 2019 at 6:22 | comment | added | Vladimir F Героям слава | While your sources didn't analyze that as an adverb, I do not see why such analysis should be wrong. Indeed, the translation to other languages would often use clear adverbs. Would that require "darkly red" in English for an adverb modifying the adjective? | |
| Jul 15, 2019 at 2:25 | comment | added | Organic Heart | @tchrist Right. Before starting this post, I have checked several dictionaries and dark is never an adverb. | |
| Jul 15, 2019 at 2:24 | comment | added | Eric Wofsey | While "dark bluer" is ungrammatical, "more dark blue" is grammatical, at least for me. (And the meaning is different from "darker blue"--the "more" is modifying the entire compound adjective "dark blue".) | |
| Jul 14, 2019 at 21:45 | history | edited | tchrist♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 14, 2019 at 21:26 | history | edited | tchrist♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 14, 2019 at 21:10 | history | answered | tchrist♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |