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In this sentence:

Ben and Jen went home.

Is home both an adverb and a noun?

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Home in this construction is short for at (one's) home (with a locative verb) or to one's home with a verb of motion.

  • Bill is (at (his)) home now.
  • They went (to their) home.

Home is one of those idiomatic locative nouns that are allowed to drop determiners and occasionally even prepositions, e.g.

  • be at (the/one's) university/college/school
  • be in (the/one's) hospital/university/college/school

So, what it is is an adverbial prepositional phrase that has been stripped of its prepositions and determiners, leaving only a naked noun to stand for the whole phrase. That's how a noun can be used as an adverb.

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    Lawler's answer is the only correct one I see here.
    – Greg Lee
    Commented Jun 14, 2015 at 13:31
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    Seems to work like temporal deictic "locatives" too: today, tomorrow.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Mar 12, 2018 at 16:34
  • @Greg Lee I see it as a noun just as little as I see it as a preposition here. I have to have a different POS. There aren't many members, and I've only come across a few people who don't lump with more traditional (as far back as CGEL, at least) POS's.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Sep 10, 2019 at 19:05
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    @EdwinAshworth, David Stampe tells of a lady from his home town in Indiana, who said in such circumstances: Sometimes I think it's the first, sometimes the other, and sometimes, I just don't know.
    – Greg Lee
    Commented Sep 11, 2019 at 5:42
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The tacit assumption in analyzing any sentence is that, for a given analysis of a sentence, every word belongs to exactly one grammatical word class, and there is one unique set of relationships between the words and the phrasal units.

In the case of an ambiguous sentence, there can be two or more possible analyses of a sentence, and so a word could belong to one word class in one analysis, and another word class in another analysis. If the sentence is not ambiguous, there is exactly one possible correct analysis (Though there will usually be debate between competing analyses).

So regardless of the word and the sentence, the answer to the OP's question is no. As another answer here points out, there will of course be cases where a particular word shows up in two different sentences with different functions in each case.

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The same word can be a noun and an adverb but in different contexts. For example, consider home.

  • I am home.
  • He stays home.
  • Ben and Jen went home.

In these sentences, home acts as an adverb, telling us the location of the subject. In other words, it qualifies the verbs be, stay and go respectively.

  • Home is where the heart is.

In this sentence, home is a noun.

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A noun can be used as an adverb as well in cases that do not involve the locative.

 "He stood at the door **hat in hand**."

Clearly, hat modifies stood by telling the manner in which he stood. Grammatically this is similar to the adverbial function found in "He ran fast."

The OED lists hat as a verb and a noun. It does list hat in hand under phrases and locutions, but does not analyze the grammatical category of the word, hat, in that case.

Of course, one could imagine many more examples: "He stood at the door chair on shoulder,*face aglow*,pockets empty, etc. There is really no limit to such usage of nouns as adverbs. In the right context, English can handle it very well.

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    I say that it is adjectival, telling us something about the subject rather than the way he was standing.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Mar 17, 2014 at 21:00
  • he stood at the door <hands on head/over his face > are semifunctional adverbs but not purely termed as adjectivial
    – user140823
    Commented Oct 1, 2015 at 8:15
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well. why make things complicated when the word HOME in the dictionary is an adverb at the same time. I can say that due to the fact that HOME is oftentimes use to answer the adverb WHERE, it is considered an adverb now. Language doesn't remain as is.

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  • Because if you make things just slightly more complicated, then you'll arrive at the correct answer. That dictionaries will list adverbial and noun (and indeed verb and adjective) senses of home doesn't answer this question, because the question is whether or not it's more than one of those in this sentence, and the answer is no, because it is not a noun in this case. That langauge doesn't remain as it is is irrelevant, not least since home has had both noun and adverb senses since Old English.
    – Jon Hanna
    Commented Feb 13, 2014 at 12:51
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HOME is a noun with an adverbial inclination; and that resolves the issue.

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    Hello, Barid Baran Acharya, and welcome to English Language & Usage. Although describing home as "a noun with an adverbial inclination" may resolve the issue from your perspective, I'm not at all sure what that phrase means. Can you cit some reference-work authority that explains or corroborates what you have in mind here? Thanks!
    – Sven Yargs
    Commented Jun 14, 2015 at 17:48
  • Home as used here is an adverbial prepositional phrase that has been stripped of its prepositions and determiners, leaving only a naked noun to stand for the whole phrase, according to John Lawler. Other sources say it has reached us via the accusative of the noun "ham" (virtually a one-word prepositional phrase, to-home) in Old English. It boils down to the same thing.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Jun 15, 2015 at 18:57

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