Adjectives as nouns, mainly as attested in Boethius translations from Old to Modern English and in Modern German

Adjectives can be used as nouns in English as well as in German. In Modern German, however, they can assume a greater variety of forms than is possible in Modern English, partly as a result of the loss of inflectional endings in English; e.g. Modern German gut das Gut, das Gute, der Gute, die Gute, die Guten, die Güter (also die Güte, die Gutheit) versus Modern English good the good, the goods (also goodness). With regard to this phenomenon, two issues deserve attention: first of all, the historical development of adjectives as nouns in English and, secondly, their linguistic classification. The merit of this study is that it undertakes the first detailed analysis of this phenomenon with the aid of corpus material. The investigation leads to intriguing conclusions that combine several linguistic levels of description, and that break with traditional concepts of rigid word-classes in favor of a theory of degrees of "adjectiviness" and "nouniness".

About the author

Anne Aschenbrenner studied English and German at the University of Munich (LMU) and completed her PhD in English Linguistics there. She currently teaches English at University.

Product details

• Authors: Anne Aschenbrenner
• Publisher: Utz Verlag
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.08.2014
• EAN: 9783831643653
• ISBN: 978-3-8316-4365-3
• No. of pages: 366
• Dimensions: 150 mm x 205 mm x 22 mm
• Weight: 514 g
• Illustrations: 11 Farbabb., 42 Tabellen
• Series: Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften; English and Beyond; Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften; English and Beyond
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; Literaturwissenschaft, Sprachwissenschaft, Linguistik, Boece; Early Modern English; King Alfred; Middle English; linguistic concepts; phenomenon; semantic features; semantic relations; syntactic features; zero-derivation