Say you have the adjective "nice". If something is nice, then it has the quality of niceness. What type of word is "niceness"? Is it still an adjective?
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1Isn't niceness the quality of being nice?– arrivalinCommented Apr 28, 2016 at 5:50
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1 Answer
This is called a nominalization, the result of making a noun out a word that isn't a noun. In this case, the word is the adjective nice, and the resulting noun niceness is the quality of being nice. In English we do this by making a morphological (i.e., form) change, in this case by adding the suffix
-ness. There are a number of ways to do this:
difficult (adjective) -> difficulty (noun)
normalize (verb) -> normalization (noun)
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zero derivation is also common, like with " good" and "bad."– herissonCommented Apr 28, 2016 at 4:47
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Just what I was after, thank you. On a side note, what would the nominalisation of "holophrastic" be? "Holophrasticity"? Commented Apr 28, 2016 at 6:27
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1@DogLover I think the noun holophrasis came first, and the adjective holophrastic was formed from the noun.– deadratCommented Apr 28, 2016 at 6:39