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Composite colour strings in English: adjectival or nominal?

par De Brabanter, Philippe ;Sharifzadeh, Saghie
Référence Lexis, 15, page (23), 3
Publication Publié, 2020-04-01

Article révisé par les pairs

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Résumé :

This paper looks into the category membership of colour words that enter into combination with modifiers like bright, dark, light, or pale. The English grammatical literature usually assumes that these ‘composite colour strings’, used attributively or predica-tively, form adjective-adjective compounds. Closer scrutiny, how-ever, reveals difficulties with this view. First, it is unusual for adjectives to modify adjectives. Second, even if they are com-pounds, it is unusual for their comparative and superlative in-flections to be marked not on the head of the structure, but in-ternally on the modifier, as in brighter red. These difficulties lead us to question the compoundhood of those strings, but also to explore the possibility that, at least in some predicative and at-tributive uses, the colour words in them are nouns. Using data from the BNC and COCA, we test our intuitions and those found in the literature. We conclude that the adjective-adjective compound analysis of composite colour strings cannot be generalised to all predicative and attributive uses. In at least some of those, the colour word is a noun. In some other cases, it may not be possible to decide if the colour word is a noun or an adjective.