Which of the following is correct?
(1) The dog is half wolf.
(2) The dog is a half wolf.
If (1) is correct, is "wolf" an uncountable noun or an adjective?
-
If a person is half genius and half idiot, or a job is half work and half play, that doesn’t make those nouns into adjectives. Why would you think it would do that to them? I wouldn’t exactly call them mass nouns either, but no, you cannot make plurals of them. They are more like categories when used that way. What exactly is the trouble here? This is an unremarkable construct.– tchrist ♦Commented Nov 30, 2012 at 4:50
-
@tchrist You say they're not an adjective or a mass noun. But semantically and syntactically, I'm leaning toward "adjective". It's not a matter of right or wrong, but a matter of the more reasonable approach. No answer/comments have persuaded me otherwise yet.– JK2Commented Nov 30, 2012 at 9:47
-
Don’t be ridiculous. If someone is half idiot, then he is half an idiot and half of an idiot. See how that works? Those are nouns. Let’s not change the half part.– tchrist ♦Commented Nov 30, 2012 at 14:12
-
1@tchrist You can say either "She's human" or "She's a human". Just because you can say "She's a human" doesn't necessarily mean "human" in "She's human" can never function as an adjective. Even though "wolf" has no entry as an adjective in dictionaries, we're treating "wolf" much the same way as "human" as in "She's human".– JK2Commented Dec 1, 2012 at 11:01
Add a comment
|
3 Answers
The correct formulation is: The dog is half wolf.
In this sentence, half wolf forms a predicate nominative which means that the sentence doesn’t change meaning if the subject and predicate are inverted. “Half of the dog’s nature is wolf” is an exactly equivalent statement.
Diagrammatically, the sentence reads “dog is wolf”. The is an article adhering to dog, and half is either an adjective describing wolf, or arguably (and probably better) an adverb that modifies “is” by itself would imply a full equality, whereas the more likely desired result is to say that half is the exact nature of the relationship.
Note that the subject dog could either be the dog (demonstrably a single dog to which your are referring) or a dog, implying that any and or all dogs are half wolf. In either case, however, an article would force the word half to modify wolf, rather than the verb is, and, in doing so, make for an awkward construction. It is awkward because half a wolf is a very concrete (if somewhat messy/gory depending on how you slice it) thing.
answered Nov 30, 2012 at 2:59
-
1@user27275 I see you are noting the same thing I did — that is, that you could also say that the dog is a half-wolf, or if you worked at it a bit, that he is half a wolf. Note that we normally hyphenate things like half-brothers, half-hours, half-lives, half-truths, half-elves, half-orcs, or half-wolves.– tchrist ♦Commented Nov 30, 2012 at 3:13
-
1@tchrist The problem is, most people would do without "a" in the context, and I wonder why.– JK2Commented Nov 30, 2012 at 3:18
-
1You could also say the dog is half a wolf. That would mean mostly the same as "half wolf" except that it would be a more figurative expression. A dog could literally be "half wolf" if one of its parents were a wolf, but if you called it "half a wolf" it would imply that it had certain lupine qualities in abundance, even though it was still 100% dog physically.– RobustoCommented Nov 30, 2012 at 3:44
-
1Half a bee, philosophically Must, ipso facto, half not be But half the bee has got to be A vis-a-vis its entity, d'you see? But can a bee be said to be Or not to be an entire bee When half the bee is not a bee Due to some ancient injury?– JimCommented Nov 30, 2012 at 4:20
-
1
(1) and (2) are both grammatical; (1) seems more idiomatic to me.
The word "half" can be used before adjectives, as in "The dog is half dead".
Nevertheless, I would be inclined to say that "wolf" is not lexicalized as an adjective in this construction. It's hard for me to be sure, but one reason is the productivity: I feel like pretty much any noun or nominal phrase could be put after "half" to form this kind of phrase. Here is an example of "half" being used with the nominal phrases "proud father" and "wide-eyed child":
the court system's chief for public safety -- referred to by other officers strictly and simply as Chief -- looked on with an expression that was half proud father and half wide-eyed child on Christmas morning.
("Justice Is Blind, but a Court Surveillance System Sees All", by Seth Schiesel, The New York Times, Sept. 2, 2004)
I don't know enough about grammatical theories of parts of speech to say whether it makes sense to say that any nominal phrase turns into an adjective in this context. But I would say that it wouldn't make sense for a dictionary to use these kind of examples as evidence for listing "adjective" as a part of speech in an entry for a word.
If it is a noun, I suppose it might technically qualify as an "uncountable noun", but that's not how I would think of it. I'm not sure whether all nouns that are in the singular form without an article are really "uncountable" in the sense that nouns like water or mud are "uncountable".
Considering that half wolf is another name for the breed Wolfdog (wolf–dog hybrid), the correct sentence should be "(2) The dog is a half wolf."
Wolf-dog Education says Mid-Contents (35%-74%) (are) g)enerally described as being “half wolf”.
-
The educated down voter may kindly enlighten me. If you have issues with your English, or with your education in general, SE can help.– KrisCommented Nov 30, 2012 at 14:56