139
votes
Accepted
Mimsy were the Borogoves - why is "mimsy" an adjective?
At the suggestion of the kind commenter, let me discuss the syntax of
All mimsy were the borogoves
There are two possibilities. The first is that mimsy is a noun, in which case we have the ...
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71
votes
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Is “I’ve boughten many vinyls” correct in its use of “boughten”?
Of boughten the OED writes:
boughten, ppl. a. [irreg. f. bought ppl. a. by assimilation to foughten] = bought ppl. a. used poet. for the sake of metre, otherwise only dial. and in U.S. in ...
- 136k
49
votes
Accepted
What part of speech is ‘mountains’ in the sentence “I like climbing mountains”?
tl;dr: The part of speech of mountains is here a noun. It’s the direct object of the verb climbing.
How we know that climbing is a verb, though, is more work. That’s because it might instead be a ...
- 136k
42
votes
Mimsy were the Borogoves - why is "mimsy" an adjective?
Later in the book, Humpty Dumpty gives Alice an explanation of the odd words in the poem and he defines 'mimsy' as 'miserable and flimsy'. In other words, we know it is an adjective because Lewis ...
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42
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Are there any class-changing prefixes in English?
Yes, there are a few derivational prefixes whose application does change
the base word class (part of speech, syntactic category) to a different
derived word class.
Prefix
Base class
Derived class
...
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37
votes
Accepted
Why is "dark" an adverb in "dark blue"?
The answer to the question “Why is dark an adverb in this sentence?” is that it is not one; that source is wrong. That’s because dark cannot ever be an adverb, let alone here. It’s just that color-...
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33
votes
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Why is "brick" in "a brick house" a noun, whereas "plastic" in "a plastic bucket" is an adjective?
This may have been addressed here before, but the overall answer is 'there is no consensus as to when certain words should be considered attributive nouns, and when they should be considered to have ...
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28
votes
Mimsy were the Borogoves - why is "mimsy" an adjective?
Fortunately, Carroll's own definition assigns the part of speech to 'mimsy'. Otherwise, the word might now be taken as an early and unprecedented appearance of the British regional 'mimsy', also an ...
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26
votes
Accepted
Are there any class-changing prefixes in English?
en-:
noun to verb: encourage, endanger, engulf, enthrone, entomb
adjective to verb: endear, enfeeble, enrich, ensure
de-:
noun to verb: debone, defang, de(-)ice
- 83.7k
21
votes
Accepted
What do you call a word that has multiple senses or parts of speech in one sentence?
I think you're referring to the term zeugma.
zeugma noun
A figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g. John and his driving licence expired last week).
- ...
- 38.9k
20
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Mimsy were the Borogoves - why is "mimsy" an adjective?
Something that hasn't been mentioned yet: "all" here is being used as an adverb. Some examples of common English phrases using this construction:
all worked up (thoroughly excited or upset e.g. "She ...
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16
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Is “I’ve boughten many vinyls” correct in its use of “boughten”?
It depends what you mean by “correct”. Different varieties of English — e.g. standard US English, or standard British English, or various regional dialects — work differently. He snuck round the ...
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16
votes
Accepted
What part of speech is 'really' when it is spoken in a sentence on its own?
As a “part of speech,” it’s just an adverb.
really adverb2 & adjective
2. Used parenthetically.
2.b. Interrogatively, expressing surprise or doubt. 1753– [selected attestations] 1893 She
...
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15
votes
Can an imperative sentence have a subject?
OK, first the vocatives.
When we name the person we're addressing, the term for that is a Vocative noun phrase. For instance:
Honey, I'm home.
Mom, you just don't understand.
Sandra, he's coming to ...
- 108k
14
votes
What is the grammatical term for “‑ed” words like these?
They are called the Past Participle.
They can either be formed by adding the suffix ed
or be an irregular such as: eat-> eaten -> fight -> fought (not to be confused with The Past Simple which is ...
- 1,387
13
votes
Mimsy were the Borogoves - why is "mimsy" an adjective?
To add to the other answers...
The poem is a pastiche of heroic poetry such as Beowulf. This inversion is generally seen by native English speakers as old-fashioned/archaic. There are many other ...
- 1,665
12
votes
Accepted
What part of speech is 'say' ? If I were, say, to use it?
Interesting question. My initial reaction was as yours: That it started out as ‘let us say’. French uses the expression ‘disons’ in exactly the same way: to indicate something given as an ...
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11
votes
What part of speech is "back" in "If you want it back"?
This is a good question. Traditional nineteenth century grammarians and most twentieth century ones classified it as an adverb. The reason is that it did not fit their definitions of nouns, verbs, ...
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10
votes
Is "running" a gerund or a participial adjective?
In your examples, "enlightening" is best seen as an adjective and "running" as a VP comprising a gerund-participle form of the verb as head.
Taking "running" first: it fails the usual tests for ...
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10
votes
Accepted
Can 'home' be an adjective as well as an adverb or a noun?
Home is a preposition according to modern grammars such as Oxford Modern English Grammar (Aarts 2011) or The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston & Pullum 2002).
According to ...
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10
votes
Accepted
Is the word 'home" never an adverb?
It depends on how you think about grammar. If you like the adverb as a traditional part of speech, then sure, it's an adverb. If you analyze grammar and syntax based on function, then you might agree ...
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10
votes
Why is "brick" in "a brick house" a noun, whereas "plastic" in "a plastic bucket" is an adjective?
The use of the word "plastic" as an adjective, and even the phrase "plastic surgery", substantially predate the invention of the materials which are commonly called "plastics&...
- 1,131
9
votes
Accepted
Are these parts of speech correct?
It's much easier to do parts of speech if we don't confuse them with grammatical relations/syntactic functions , and if we don't get distracted by inflections. A verb is still a verb, regardless of ...
- 47.6k
9
votes
Is "running" a gerund or a participial adjective?
tl;dr
Despite running being in origin the -ING inflection of the verb to run, in your “a running experiment” example, it is no longer a verb and therefore ᴄᴀɴɴᴏᴛ be either a gerund or a participle ...
- 136k
9
votes
Accepted
Are articles pronouns?
TL;DR
Traditionally, a is regarded as a determinative. Traditionally, any is considered a determinative when used with a following noun and either a determinative or a pronoun when used on its own, ...
- 47.6k
9
votes
similar to or similarly to
To this point, the original poster and a commenter have suggested three options for expressing the intended idea:
The fragments were obtained similar to the sticks.
The fragments were obtained ...
- 166k
9
votes
What part of speech is 'really' when it is spoken in a sentence on its own?
The PoS here is Interjection.
Per Wiktionary:
(informal) Indicating surprise at, or requesting confirmation of, some new information; to express skepticism.
A: He won the Nobel Prize yesterday.
B: ...
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9
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What part of speech is 'really' when it is spoken in a sentence on its own?
I
You can run a hundred meters in 13 seconds. Really ?
In this first paragraph, "really" is categorized as a content disjunct (one of the four categories of adverbials in A Comprehensive ...
- 23.2k
8
votes
Accepted
What is it called when a word is used to refer to the word, not its meaning?
The term for referring to a word in a sentence instead of actually using the word is "use-mention distinction." In standard English it is normal to offset the mentioned word in some way (here on ELU, ...
- 59.5k
8
votes
How many parts of speech can a word be at the same time?
Yes
There are constructions called zeugmas (after Greek ζεῦγμα, 'a yoking') where a word or phrase is intentionally made to apply to two or more others in a sentence despite functioning differently ...
- 10.3k
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