Coming up on Word Matters, when a word dresses up as a member of another part of speech.
I'm Emily Brewster and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Amon Shea,
Peter Sokolowski and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
Words can be placed into categories based on their functions.
Nouns do one thing, verbs another, adjectives another still,
but sometimes a word from one category sneaks into the spot in a sentence that's usually the territory of words from another category.
Then what?
I'll address this phenomenon.
We all know that a noun is a word for a person, place, or thing.
A noun also is an animal, a quality, an idea, or an action.
But sometimes we see nouns in the place that an adjective typically goes.
An adjective, of course, is a word that describes a noun.
Red, soft, loud, cumbersome, dreadful, delightful.
So sometimes we see a noun in that spot just before a noun that usually belongs to an adjective.
So for example, we might have a business meeting.
Business looks like it's modifying the word meeting.
It is modifying the word meeting.
But is business actually an adjective then?
What is its grammatical category?