Mythbuster #3: Words belong only to a single part of speech. (Not!)

Posted February, 1999.

Many words are not limited to a single part of speech. Nouns can be used as adjectives or verbs without much difficulty, for example dog can be used as follows:

Rover is a dog.

The detective dogged the suspect until she revealed her secret.

It had been a long night, and he was dog tired.

The history of English (and every other language) is filled with examples where a word is extended to have a wider range of meanings or uses. Teachers often discourage novel uses of words for a variety of reasons, which we will examine in our mythbuster on Proper English. At the same time, we admire the ability of a poet or songwriter to extend the use of words. Cognitive scientists have developed a theory of prototypes which is very useful when looking at words. If we assume that a word has a general meaning made up of many properties, we can find new ways to use the word by concentrating on just one of the features. To flashback to the 60s, let’s look at the word groove. The general meaning is an indentation of some length. Grooves were an integral part of vinyl records. When the needle on a phonograph stayed in the groove on the record, the music could come out as intended. Being in the groove meant being in the right place, or tuned in to the right music. This was extended outside of the realm of music, and became a general phrase used in a positive sense. The now-discarded groovy was just a further extension of the meaning, now used as an adjective. The meaning is no longer so obvious, as vinyl records have given way to digital technology. To the extent anyone still uses the word, it is just an adjective now. The link between the noun groove and adjective groovy is not part of our mental dictionary, but is only a part of our accidental knowledge of language history.

There is nothing in our language which prohibits changing the grammar of a word to reflect new nuances of meaning. If we constantly make up new uses for words, our friends may think we are strange and have a hard time understanding us. This can be turned to the advantage of a speech community, and often is exploited by young people who like to be able to communicate among themselves without parents understanding them. There are no categories that can’t be shifted to other types. Even prepositions are not immune:

in Not eating meat is the in thing these days. (in = popular)

out The politician was outted by his opponent. (out = to publicize a person’s sexual preference without permission)

up He upped the ante. (up = increase)

down That movie was a real downer. (downer = negative experience)

He downed the ball on the three yard line. (down=verb)

Summary: We have seen that words in English are flexible and that new uses and grammatical functions are not only possible, but common.

The following table gives examples of some problems that parts of speech fail to solve, using just the traditional notion of "noun". It also presents a solution in our framework. The definitions of parts of speech are drawn from various educational sources.

Part of speech	Definition	Problem	Solution
Noun	A noun is a person, place or thing	Many nouns are abstract, and proper names behave like noun phrases, not nouns.	Forget about a definition which relies on meaning, which is not part of the syntax. Concentrate instead on substitution.
Noun	A noun can be inflected to become either plural, possessive, or both.	Possessive markers attach to phrases (The woman I went to school with’s daughter), so that is not a valid test. Some nouns are already plural, such as series and data. In any case, this is a matter of morpohology alone.	We can talk about morphological elements that are nominal (combine with certain types of affixes) but this has no relevance for the syntax. The possessive -‘s attaches to the right edge of a syntactic structure which is often bigger than a word.
Noun	A noun is either a common noun or a proper noun	The morphology and syntax of the two are completely different. Proper nouns do not take suffixes such as -ness or -ity.	Common nouns are nouns in our grammar. Proper nouns are noun phrases.
Noun	A noun is something that can be preceded by an adjective.	This works provided that we exclude the proper nouns.

Where to go from here: Mythbuster #4: (not available yet).

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