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[Mister Al]

My original post has opened an interesting can of worms resulting in some mighty fine education for the less linguistically sophisticated of us....cheers!

[Lobster]

No problems mate. I'm sensitive or insensitive depending on how my day's going.

In all cases the first word is a modifier of the second and is used to add definition to that second word, thus the second word is really the basis for what the item actually is. I suppose that's why 'gun toy' is not acceptable, while 'poodle toy' is.

It's true that the buyer of the car would likely be staring at it while proclaiming "This is blue!", but the seller would not be able to see that, so I don't understand how it would be considered part of the transmission of information.

Cheers Mr. Al! Some of us actually find this kind of thing interesting. Are we lame?

RED

[11:59]

Beyond1984, I would love to know from where you got the impression I taught on the SNET scheme. I hope it was not from anything I wrote! As I stated in the post above, I teach undergraduate linguistics (and EAP, EST, EAW, ESP). And as I noted in that brief post, that treatment is far from exhaustive � as I state, it is just scratching the surface. Adjectives are extremely contentious, even in seemingly-simple run-of-the-mill introductory descriptive linguistics. And the aspects related to the possible positioning of adjectives in English is not prescriptive! On the contrary, it is wholly descriptive.

Prescriptive grammar takes the form of nonsensical statements such as 'You can't/shouldn't (it can be worded differently) end a sentence with a preposition, because you couldn't in Latin' (though this last part is often left unstated). You will often hear the same regarding the splitting of infinitives. In Latin infinitives could not be split and so, when scholars really did indeed seem to believe that Latin (and to a lesser extent, Greek) was the 'ideal' language � the perfect language, and that everything else was but a corruption thereof, they thought it well inside their purview to try to impose this grammar onto the grammar of English. That is, they took a descriptive rule from one language (Latin) and made it a prescriptive rule in another (English). Why? I don't know. What I do know though is that the texts these scholars studied seemed to play a role in shaping their thoughts.

Anyway, leaving aside the ridiculous notion of an 'ideal, God-given' language, what these prescriptive twerps frequently neglect to mention (perhaps as they don't know) is that in Latin you couldn't split an infinitive. You couldn't split it because it 'un-split-able'! It is not at all similar to 'splitting' 'to go' by saying 'to boldly go' because 'to go' is two words and two separate morphemes; infinitives in Latin were (and are!) one word (no matter the number of morphemes) and so it would be like trying to split 'go', i.e., 'g-boldly-o'.

To say that attributive and predicative positioning of the adjective 'heavy' results in two different interpretations from native speakers when used to modify 'smoker' is not to resort to prescriptive grammar. That is, it does not seem to be something that speakers learn (I doubt if many � or any � mothers say to their offspring that they can't say 'the awake boy' and/or 'The heavy smoker' is very different from 'The smoker is heavy', and even if they did, how many kids would listen and remember?). Rather, such aspects simply appear to emerge from the language, that is, from the underlying grammar (and native speakers will often be wholly unaware of their knowledge of such matters). Statements such as that referring to 'heavy' and 'smoker' are the result of computer assisted searches conducted on corpora (corpus linguistics) and grammaticality judgment tasks with native speakers (psycholinguistics). The difference here being of course that native speakers will and do accept sentences that end in a preposition (because it is not grammaticality deviant in English). Indeed, in corpora it is possible to find examples of sentences which end in no fewer than five prepositions! The classic example of such a sentence normally cited is when a child is disappointed by the book that their father has brought to their bedroom for their bedtime story and exclaims, 'Daddy, why did you bring that book that I don't want to be read to out of up for?' Native speakers of English accept this clause even though it ends in some five ('to', 'out', 'of', 'up' & 'for') prepositions (and it seems remarkably simple to parse, too).

As regards the mini-debate currently raging above I have to say that I am quite surprised. I gave the examples I did merely to introduce some simple examples of how adjectives (when used in combination with real world knowledge) can appear in sentences with identical surface forms but have radically different logicosemantic relations, in this case that of implication. Thus 'This is a blue gun', 'This is a small moon' and 'This is a toy gun' imply 'This is blue' and 'This is a gun', 'This is a moon' but not 'This is small', and 'This is a toy' and 'This is not a gun' respectively. If those examples are too controversial than I can give some other (hopefully less controversial) examples. How about 'hard' in 'This is a hard book' and 'This is a hard rock'? It seems here (as with 'toy' and 'gun') that it is what we know about books and rocks that tells us what aspects of the objects are (or can be) modified through an adjective.

[Lobster]

Nice post. On of the problems I perceive in the Chinese education system is its obsession with presciptive (proscriptive?) grammar. Today one of my students assaulted a sentence I'd written: "Asking the reader questions can help lead them to understanding and make them think more about your arguments. " Maybe I've been in China too long and am starting to write Chinglish, but I thought the sentence would pass the litmus test of native-speaker acceptance.

RED