David Lim wrote:Stephen Carlson wrote:David Lim wrote:Even English grammar recognises that some nouns can function as adjectives and some cannot.
Well, not the leading English grammars. For example, the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, p. 537, explicitly rejects this claim:Traditional school grammar (though not scholarly traditional grammar) tends to analyse the underlined nouns [e.g. as in a government inquiry, the Clinton administration, a London park, the Caroline factor, etc.] here as adjectives -- or to say that they are 'nouns used as adjectives'. From our perspective, this latter formulation represents a confusion between categories and functions: they are not nouns used as adjectives, but nouns used as attributive modifiers. Apart from pronouns, just about any noun can appear in this function -- including proper nouns as in the London, Clinton, and Caroline examples. The words can all appear as head of an NP in subject or object function, where they are uncontroversially nouns; to analyse them as adjectives when they are functioning attributively would make the adjective category far too heterogeneous, and require an unwarranted and massive overlap between the adjective and noun categories.
All these show that these words can function as nouns or adjectives. None of them need to be classified as "fundamentally" nouns or adjectives or anything else, just as words like "first" and "such". But in the above examples of their usage they are indeed adjectives.
No, that is exactly not what Pullum and Huddleston are saying in the excerpt I took the trouble to locate and quote for you. If you're really serious about understanding this issue, I would invite you to read the literature I have been citing in this thread and reflect upon it.
