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I have seen this post for the answer to my question, but this is not much help in case of the question I am going to ask.
Here is an example sentence -
The new design of Twitter profile is more of a Facebook profile than never before.
than here is a preposition, there is no doubt about that. But before after than acts like a noun. But from dictionary entry against before doesn't say it's a noun.
So what is the explanation?
'[T]han here is a preposition, there is no doubt about that.' [OP]
and
'A noun is the only part of speech possible after a preposition'
and
In the accepted phrase 'better than ever before', 'ever' cannot be a noun.
So we have a contradiction. The only question to address really is how many of the above assertions are not true?
If we look at
'It is better than [it] ever [was before]
we find a construction which presents no problems. Here, 'than' is a conjunction; there is no doubt about that. 'Ever' is an adverb.
But in the ellipted version, 'than' is now an ex-conjunction and 'ever' is an ex-adverb. In other words, forcing traditional analyses on elliptical structures will lead to extra-grammatical analyses (ie 'the rules' will be broken).
You’ve asked a loaded question when you say, “Can an adverb be noun?” It has hidden assumptions that render both potential answers — that is, either yes or no — in some way wrong.
It’s like asking someone whether they’ve stopped beating their husband yet. No matter whether they answer yes or no, they’ve landed themselves in hot water.
In the husband-beating question, the problems should I hope be self-evident. In yours, let me spell them out for you.
You are assuming that a word in isolation “is” some part of speech. This is never true. Parts of speech and other, broader labels (such as subject, predicate, verbal phrase, adverbial phrase, direct object, &c) are applied to constituents of a phrase or larger utterance once it has been subjected to syntactic analysis — once it has been parsed.
A single word in complete isolation has no part of speech. It cannot. Only when you deduce or infer what role that word is playing in the larger syntactic context can one begin to assign such labels.
For example, what part of speech is each of these words:
Kinda tough, right? Would these additions make it any easier?
The answer is yes, it helps considerably — but not completely. That’s because what you really need to complete the job is this:
My scortle’s floopess prated me to rastfully flump her the ruzzest plock I could tyrn.
Or perhaps this:
My nyrt’s pratess flooped me to ruzz her the plockest flumper I could scortle the rastest.
Or maybe even this:
My flumpette’s scortle ruzzled me to pratefully plock her the most derasted of floops I could rynt.
I trust you will now have no trouble assigning parts of speech to all of floop, floops, flooped, floopess, flump, flumper, flumpette’s, nyrt’s, plock, plockest, prated, pratess, pratest, ruzz, ruzzest, ruzzled, rynt, scortle, scortle’s, and tyrn.
Or will you?
You see, without having the sentences, you can have no part of speech. And even once you have the sentences, the part-of-speech tag assigned a lexical item in one sentence quite often contradicts the POS assignment in another sentence.
So you see, it makes no sense to ask whether an adverb can be noun. It cannot be, because it is an adverb. That does not mean that a word that is sometimes used as an adverb cannot turn around the next floop and get itself used as noun this time around.
A good example of that is today, tomorrow, and yesterday. Today I have nothing to do, but tomorrow I shall rue the yesterday that I shall by then have squandered. Or, as a better writer than I once said:
She should have died hereafter.
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
So whether you classify a word as this or that, it signifies nothing in isolation.
This is true for Donatus’s eight classical parts of speech, from
Partes orationis quot sunt? Octo. Quae?
- nomen
- pronomen
- verbum
- adverbium
- participium
- coniunctio
- praepositio
- interiectio
To the modern analyst’s standard workhorses:
To the subdivider’s nuanced list of:
Because no matter what set you pick — and there are many others besides just these three — when you try to talk about them in the abstract and apply them to a single word in isolation, they are all so much sound and fury, signifying nothing.
In closing, kindly let me commend to you these two scortling answers for unruzzled meditations:
The new design of Twitter profile is more of a Facebook profile than ever before.
As usual with confusing sentences, this one has been done things to.
First, the final /n/ in than has been misheard at some link in the chain and added to ever.
Producing the ungrammatical phrase than never before. That's corrected to ever above.
Second, big chunks of the sentence have been sheared off by several deletion rules; this is normal for a comparative construction, where the machinery of comparison is mostly taken for granted.
Third, and most important, comparative constructions are really complicated. For example,
a stripped-down version of what the comparative construction produces might be
T resembles FT has ever resembled F before.Since the subject T and the predicate resemble F are mentioned in the first clause,
they get deleted by optional conjunction reduction, leaving only the boldface pieces, both adverbs.
So what we have here in the original sentence is the remains of a deceased clause,
with the repeated parts left out because they're predictable.
And that's why than looks like a preposition. But it's not -- it's part of the comparative construction.
If you absolutely have to give than a name, then call it the English Comparative Conjunction. Than is never used outside
of comparative constructions of one kind or another.
As for the rest, before is an adverb, and the reason you think it "acts like a noun after than"
is because you think than is a preposition, with an object noun. Since it's not a preposition,
all bets are off. Actually, it's a subordinate clause, part of the comparative construction,
but ever before is the only part of that clause that's left standing.
Oh, one final point. Dictionaries do not give all -- or often any -- of the grammar for words. Grammar can't be looked up in a dictionary; particularly English grammar, which is all syntax -- i.e, it's words in constructions, not words by themselves.
I would use ever instead of never although I doubt it changes the meaning at all:
The new design of Twitter profile is more of a Facebook profile than ever before.
I actually read that sentence as:
The new design of Twitter profile is more of a Facebook profile than [it] ever [was] before.
Or in a simpler sentence:
I have more money now than ever before.
I have more money now than [I] ever [had] before.
The same goes for:
I feel better today than yesterday.
I feel better today than [I felt] yesterday.
Why should ever before or yesterday be acting as a noun?
The Oxford English Dictionary does have a listing for "before" as a noun, meaning "in front of" or "an earlier period of time" (with the example of "from before", which doesn't yield to the ellipsis theory as well as "than before"). So the answer is, yes, it can be a noun. But it's not because an adverb can be a noun; it's because "before" can be an adverb or a noun (or a preposition or a conjunction) depending on the context.
The new design of Twitter profile is more of a Facebook profile than ever before or The new design of Twitter profile is more of a Facebook profile, never before had it been so similar.
