[quote=“Tempo Gain”]I’d wager “bubble gum” is preferred for the noun. “Bubblegum” is the adjective, as in “The Cars” lol.
[/quote]
TG bubblegum is never an adjective. It’s a noun modifying another noun (e.g. “cars”). Nor is “bubble” – it’s a noun which can be used to modify “gum”, “tea” etc.
(otherwise you have to claim that every noun in English is also an adjective)
[quote=“smithsgj”][quote=“Tempo Gain”]I’d wager “bubble gum” is preferred for the noun. “Bubblegum” is the adjective, as in “The Cars” lol.
[/quote]
TG bubblegum is never an adjective. It’s a noun modifying another noun (e.g. “cars”). Nor is “bubble” – it’s a noun which can be used to modify “gum”, “tea” etc.
(otherwise you have to claim that every noun in English is also an adjective)[/quote]
What is its function in the sentence, young traveler? 
Perhaps this will convince you 
TG: I’m just trying to inform people here what the score is. What you’ve done is temp all the discussion (evidence from BNC showing that attributive modifier “bubblegum” is a noun, Wikipedia link explaining the difference between adjectives nominal attributive modifiers).
You’ve left only evidence supporting your own viewpoint…
dictionary.com and MW are probably wrong
The British National Corpus POS annotation and Longman are probably right.
so d.com has down every noun it can think of which can ever modify another noun as an adjective. I’ve checked a few: jet (engine), book (department), water (journey). But they don’t have cancer (ward), brain (cell), iridium (atom). Cancer, brain and iridium are nouns only. “Railroad” is listed as a noun only; in fact, on the d.com account it should be an adjective, because they have “railroad car” down as an example under “car”. Thus, the reader of d.com is left to assume – incorrectly – that railroad can be an adjective, even though d.com is completely silent on the matter. (edited this sentence)This is just sloppy cross-referencing – the product is basically crap.
They could try and list them exhaustively, but eventually they’d have to give up and concede (edited) that in fact ALL nouns can act as attributive modifiers. The syntactic model is there in compounds like “car park” (BC PLEASE don’t try and tell me that “car” is an adjective here!); doesn’t it make a lot more sense to lump everything together (car park, bubblegum pop, iridium atom, stone wall, lead pipe, lead singer ldoceonline.com/dictionary/lead_2) and just admit that they are all pairs of nouns.
That’s what linguists have been saying for decades, and anyone who believes otherwise probably wasn’t concentrating in class when they were doing Phrase Structure rules.
(I wonder what people think about expression like “the quick and the dead”, “the meek”, “the great unwashed”, “the uninformed”, “the pathologically stupid” etc. Some of these are down as “nouns” in the d.com (n.) version of things. But some of them aren’t. And again, you can take more or less any adjective and find a context to make it work with “the” to mean “people in this adjectival category”. And guess what… adjectives they are, and adjectives they remain.
[quote]The syntactic model is there in compounds like “car park” (BC PLEASE don’t try and tell me that “car” is an adjective here!); doesn’t it make a lot more sense to lump everything together (car park, bubblegum pop, iridium atom, stone wall, lead pipe, lead singer ldoceonline.com/dictionary/lead_2) and just admit that they are all pairs of nouns.
[/quote]
I don’t care whether you think I (and everyone else but - quel surprise- someone is only responding to Buttercup) am wrong. It is not about the label you put on the word, but its function in the sentence. It’s first year stuff, and an all-googling one man band doesn’t change that. ‘Grammar for internet battles’ is a degree subject now?
dictionary.com is idiotic but it’s free. Merriam Webster are a respected American dictionary publisher, and while their online product is not exactly exhaustive, it’s of good quality.
BC that is ad hominem. You ridicule me, not because of my arguments, but because you think you are better qualified than me to speak on these matters.
The complaint in your post: I directed part of the reply to BC because it seemed no-one else was really engaging with the discussion. It’s fine to disagree, but please, others’ “This is what mw.com says, and you don’t know a fucking adjective is” is not really a valid intellectual position. I’ve tried to give a careful explanation of why a noun that modifies a noun remains a noun.
(Quelle surprise, I might add (making a point of getting the French correct if I’m going to be affected enough to use such an expression in the first place.))
Buttercup I am not new to linguistics. I am not using Google in this discussion, except to locate the online dictionaries that have been mentioned. I have the BNC on my desktop because I use it for research almost every day. I have a degree in linguistics with first class honours (yes I know la de da but what do you expect at this point). It must have been different from the one you did, because where I did mine they explained, with reference to Huddlestone’s Grammar of English, how noun modifiers work, and did not tell us fibs about nouns mysteriously transforming themselves into adjectives whenever they modify other nouns: not in the first year or any other year. They gave us the mainstream linguistics view on phrase structure rules and part of speech, and that is what I am repeating here.
I also did a masters and a PhD in computational linguistics, and as part of that experience I learnt a fair amount about how POS is assigned, both by human annotators and automatically. Of course you are right that the structure of the sentence in question is central to the analysis, but at the end of the day, yes, we are concerned precisely with assigning labels. A label is what POS is! We look at the lexicon first (in one kind of computational analysis) to see what POS are available for each word in the sentence, and then choose which is the correct one (for those words that have more than one POS available) based on our parse or analysis of the sentence.
An analogue of this kind of lexicon (probably) exists in the human brain. This is a standard position in psycholinguistics. The lexicon has info about how words are pronounced, what they mean, and what POS they have. It has to know about POS, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to put sentences together systematically when we speak.
Now can you see what a waste of space it would be if every noun, in its lexical entry, had to say “adjective” as well. Waste of space in computer memory and processing, and, presumably, in the mental representation too. Why would the brain hold redundant information? “All nouns can also be adjectives, but only when modifying nouns”.
Also, adjectives behave differently from nominal attributive modifiers. Nearly all adjectives (with a few exceptions like “mere”, and maybe “little”), can also be used predicatively. You can make sentences that have the same underlying syntactic representation: “The big house is over there” is almost the same as “The house is big and it’s over there”. “The book department is over there” cannot be rendered as “*The department is book and it’s over there”.
For “The French teacher” you can’t say “The teacher is French” to mean that the teacher teaches French. “French” can be an adjective or a noun: if “French-adj teacher” is used, it means the teacher has French nationality. If “French-n teacher” is used, it means they teach the subject. You may not be able to hear the difference between French-adj and French-n, but they are two different instantiations of the word, with different parts of speech. That’s how a computer analyses it, and the same applies to your brain.
“This bubblegum music sounds crap” is not the same as “This music is bubblegum and it’s crap”. If you can say the second sentence at all (and I’m not convinced) then the word “bubblegum”, there, is clearly a noun. If that stands, it follows that the attributive modifier “bubblegum” is, indeed, a noun.
Grand. I’m not engaging with you either. Where did you get that idea? Furthermore, I’m not ridiculing you. This thread has nothing to do with me.
I merely posted, extremely stupidly, one comment, above. Of course now the thread has been fucked up by the mod, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s been temped - why carry it on here?
In the sentence “St Trinians was a bubblegum movie,” what form does the word bubblegum take?
I temped it because it was all mixed up with back and forth bickering, with the exception of the first two posts I left and mine, and one or two other short ones between you and Buttercup which I should have kept, apologies there. It wasn’t my intent to leave only my point of view.
The sense of “bubblegum” I mentioned is pretty far from the original sense of the noun for one thing. It looks pretty clearly like an adjective to me. In any event, it’s just a semantic difference. It seems useful to me to refer to it as an adjective. I don’t see the harm in doing so.
[quote=“Buttercup”]Grand. I’m not engaging with you either. Where did you get that idea? Furthermore, I’m not ridiculing you. This thread has nothing to do with me.
I merely posted, extremely stupidly, one comment, above. Of course now the thread has been fucked up by the mod, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s been temped - why carry it on here?[/quote]
Fair point. Had to vent. Like I said, no-one was commenting except you. TG made the original observation that bubblegum was an adj, I responded to that, Rik and the Chief then reacted in a fairly rude and uncouth way, and I decided it needed settling. [just seen TG’s post so removed comment on mod action here]
I think that all your posts on Taiwan life and SLA are excellent, btw. You are far more respected on flob than me, and that reputation is deserved. I know I usually just sound off and seem moronic, but in this case I do know what I’m talking about.
[quote=“Tempo Gain”]I temped it because it was all mixed up with back and forth bickering, with the exception of the first two posts I left and mine, and one or two other short ones between you and Buttercup which I should have kept, apologies there. It wasn’t my intent to leave only my point of view.
The sense of “bubblegum” I mentioned is pretty far from the original sense of the noun for one thing. It looks pretty clearly like an adjective to me. In any event, it’s just a semantic difference. It seems useful to me to refer to it as an adjective. I don’t see the harm in doing so.[/quote]
No problem, thanks for explaining.
The problem with your analysis is mostly that “bubblegum” can’t really be used predicatively with an adjectival meaning. If you do it ends up sounding like the [movie|song|…] actually is revolting smeary candy. Longman gives one instance of “iron” as an adjective: in the expression “iron fist”. It claims that this a special “attributive only” adjective. Are you convinced? I ain’t.
Also remember that convenience is one thing; but we are trying to describe the actual facts of mental representation, as far as possible. This is (I think, lol) the teaching forum; and what we do and say in class should, jinliang, reflect the linguistic facts rather than pedagogical convenience.
Is it one? You know what, with all this backing and forthing, I’ve barely paused to consider what the damn word means [edited typo]. Surely that smeary shite must be banned in posho schools?
Anyway it’s a noun. Like “horror” or “adventure” or bla bla.
Is it one? You know what, with all this backing and forthing, I’ve barely paused to consider what the damn word words. Surely that smeary shite must be banned in posho schools?
Anyway it’s a noun. Like “horror” or “adventure” or bla bla.[/quote]
‘Bubblegum’ refers to frivolous and rubbishy things. Sure ‘horror’ is a noun, but ‘horrible’ is an adj. I therefore suggest that in the sentence ‘…a bubblegum movie or a bubblegum novel’ the word bubblegum is an adjective.
Is it one? You know what, with all this backing and forthing, I’ve barely paused to consider what the damn word words. Surely that smeary shite must be banned in posho schools?
Anyway it’s a noun. Like “horror” or “adventure” or bla bla.[/quote]
‘Bubblegum’ refers to frivolous and rubbishy things. Sure ‘horror’ is a noun, but ‘horrible’ is an adj. I therefore suggest that in the sentence ‘…a bubblegum movie or a bubblegum novel’ the word bubblegum is an adjective.[/quote]
Even tho you’re ok that “horror movie” is noun+noun?
Horror movie is noun + noun.
Horrible movie is adj + noun.
I don’t see ‘bubblegum’ refering to a genre, but to a sense of frivolity or kitsch.
[quote=“smithsgj”]
The problem with your analysis is mostly that “bubblegum” can’t really be used predicatively with an adjectival meaning. If you do it ends up sounding like the [movie|song|…] actually is revolting smeary candy. Longman gives one instance of “iron” as an adjective: in the expression “iron fist”. It claims that this a special “attributive only” adjective. Are you convinced? I ain’t.[/quote]
I disagree. I can hear “wow that’s really bubblegum” in my head without much trouble. “Iron” as in “iron fist” would be a different case. Is it more of a US usage? I’m not getting that feeling from this thread, but it might explain the dictionary differences.
Sure, but it seems we disagree on the linguistic facts. This walks and talks like an adjective to me.
[quote=“TomHill”]Horror movie is noun + noun.
Horrible movie is adj + noun.
I don’t see ‘bubblegum’ refering to a genre, but to a sense of frivolity or kitsch.[/quote]
Sure. Although the original claim on the thread was merely that “bubblegum” has an adj reading, it quickly became clear that most people felt that all nouns “become adjectives” somehow when modifying another noun.
I think that’s now been cleared up, so we’re in the same territory on this.
Are you are claiming that attr modifs must be “genres”, otherwise they are ruled adjectival? Well, budget movie, home movie and Hollywood movie are not really genres, are they? Pornographic and romantic are clear genres, and (equally clearly) adjectives, so I can’t quite see where the genre criterion is taking us.
@TG: “Wow that’s really bubblegum”. I wouldn’t say it, but then I only learnt the word when I first read this thread! Could you say instead “Wow that’s nothing but bubblegum”?
I just checked ukwac, which is a 1.5 billion word corpus compiled from the web in this century. There are 16 entries for “bubblegum” in sentence final position. All refer to the chewable sort, except for “…orchestral pop mixed with a bit of seventies bubblegum.” and “Total bubblegum!” Both are tagged as nouns, of course. So, not enough evidence to judge.
Having looked at this second corpus, I’m going to have to fess up and say that the annotation of this corpus does allow for an adjectival “bubblegum”, although it’s not applied consistently. I’m pretty sure it’s a tagset developed in the US…
[quote=“smithsgj”] I also did a masters and a PhD in computational linguistics, and as part of that experience I learnt a fair amount about how POS is assigned, both by human annotators and automatically. Of course you are right that the structure of the sentence in question is central to the analysis, but at the end of the day, yes, we are concerned precisely with assigning labels. A label is what POS is! We look at the lexicon first (in one kind of computational analysis) to see what POS are available for each word in the sentence, and then choose which is the correct one (for those words that have more than one POS available) based on our parse or analysis of the sentence.
An analogue of this kind of lexicon (probably) exists in the human brain. This is a standard position in psycholinguistics. The lexicon has info about how words are pronounced, what they mean, and what POS they have. It has to know about POS, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to put sentences together systematically when we speak.
Now can you see what a waste of space it would be if every noun, in its lexical entry, had to say “adjective” as well. Waste of space in computer memory and processing, and, presumably, in the mental representation too. Why would the brain hold redundant information? “All nouns can also be adjectives, but only when modifying nouns”. [/quote]
By your own description (which I agree with) that is precisely the kind of information that the brain “must” have. It must hold the knowledge that most words that function as nouns can also function as adj. before other nouns.
What is the difference between saying that a word functions as an adjective and saying that it “is” an adjective?
If you buy an abandoned fish farm you don’t buy a fish, you buy a farm. Fish doesn’t “function” as a noun. It isn’t a noun in this sentence. It’s an adjective. It descibes “farm”. That is what an adjective is, a word that describes a noun. Some words have particular characteristics (comparative and superlative forms for ex.) that set them off as being only adjectives but that doesn’t mean that a word that doesn’t also have these qualities is not an adjective.
You said it yourself here…