10.84, Disc: New: Adjective to Verb

[LINGUIST Network]

LINGUIST List:  Vol-10-84. Tue Jan 19 1999. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 10.84, Disc: New: Adjective to Verb

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=================================Directory=================================

1)
Date:  Tue, 12 Jan 1999 11:19:47 -0500 (EST)
From:  Mike_Maxwell at SIL.ORG
Subject:  New discussion: Adj to Verb

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Tue, 12 Jan 1999 11:19:47 -0500 (EST)
From:  Mike_Maxwell at SIL.ORG
Subject:  New discussion: Adj to Verb

I once had a non-native speaker of English tell me that "in English,
you can verb almost anything."  I've noticed over the years many such
on-the-fly uses of nouns as verbs, but I don't recall running into any
new uses of adjectives as verbs.  Then today I ran into the following
(in an Internet discussion of using the Microsoft Word program):

    In documents Newed from this template...
    [I] then tried a) attaching that template to existing documents,
    b) Newing a document from that template...

(The context is that in Word, if you create a document template with
certain properties, you can then create new documents having these
properties by clicking on a menu choice labeled "New".)

Now that I've seen such a usage, it strikes me as odd that Adj-->Verb
coinings are (apparently) rarer than Noun-->Verb coinings, since
adjectives are in some sense "between" nouns and verbs.  (For
instance, in Chomsky's "Remarks on Nominalization" paper, nouns are
[+N -V], verbs are [-N +V], and adjectives are [+N +V].  Likewise, in
many languages adjective-like words are morphosyntactically nouns,
while in other languages they act like verbs.)  One might therefore
think novel deadjectival verb usages would be more common, not less.


Mike Maxwell
Mike_Maxwell at sil.org
Summer Institute of Linguistics

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