Gourmet, attributive and predicative adjective (was Re: re "foodie")

[Laurence Horn]

>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: re "foodie"
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> By the way, I need to be educated here. OED lists Gourmet b. as
>> "attributive and quasi-adjective". Is there any reason why "gourmet
>> food" or "gourmet meal" does not have "gourmet" as just an adjective? It
>> might have been attributive initially (i.e., food fit for a gourmet),
>> but that is certainly not how it is used now. To make things even more
>> interesting, we now have gourmet cuts, gourmet spices, gourmet
>> preparations, gourmet quality, etc.
>>
The proliferation of these collocations doesn't automatically make "gourmet" an adjective, since the use of "brick" in e.g. "brick wall", "brick house", "brick oven", "brick shithouse", etc. doesn't turn "brick" into an adjective; it's still a noun in each of these noun-noun compounds.  For me, the most convincing argument that "gourmet" in the above examples has shifted to adjectival status is the possibility of getting e.g. "This restaurant remains/became gourmet", "a very/really gourmet meal", "how gourmet are those preparations?"  The last couple may be hard to get because if "gourmet" is an adjective, it's still probably not a scalar or gradable one.  But I'm not sure those first two non-gradable contexts really work that well either, where appearing as the complement of "remain", "stay", or "become" supports adjectival vs. nominal status.  YMMV.

LH

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