I'm wondering about the use of the past tense as an adjective and whether it is possible to use it in noun phrases such as 'glass bottom boat' and 'plastic bottle drinks.' Are 'glass bottomed boat' and 'plastic bottled drinks' both incorrect? To me they seem so.
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1They're not past tense, but passive. Subject closed.– Yosef BaskinCommented Jan 30, 2022 at 3:44
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1They're certainly not past tense, but they're not passive, either. They're adjectives formed from past participles. If you think about it, there is no verb to bottom, just as there is no verb to shell meaning 'to have a shell'; we use a privative shell to mean 'remove a shell', but certainly not to mean 'have a shell'. On the other hand, being shelled, like being marine, is simply a predicate adjective.– John LawlerCommented Jan 30, 2022 at 4:20
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@JohnLawler It seems, from your argument, that the conclusion is that they're formed not from past participles of verbs, but from nouns. (As you rightly say, in some cases there is no verb, or no verb with the relevant meaning.)– Rosie FCommented Jan 30, 2022 at 7:11
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@RosieF Nobody knows where they come from. Historically, little niceties like official POS are irrelevant. An adjective can come from anything at all; this isn't morphology any more -- it's history, with all its stochastic fury.– John LawlerCommented Jan 30, 2022 at 14:30
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1 Answer
What you suggest is in normal if not common usage in UK English. The past tense makes sense in that the drink was bottled, and helps to reduce ambiguity - the bottle is plastic, not the drink (plastic-bottled drink rather than plastic bottle-drink, whatever that is).
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I agree with your use of the hyphen. A "plastic bottled drink" reads to me as a bottled drink made of plastic rather than a drink sold in a bottle made of plastic and that is nonsensical. An analogy would be "an alcoholic bottled drink" which would, quite reasonably, be an alcoholic drink sold in a bottle.– BoldBenCommented Jan 30, 2022 at 8:13