6

Doing a part-of-speech breakdown on Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian".

He will not see again the freezing kitchenhouse in the predawn dark.

I ran the sentence through a POS website and it marked "freezing" as a noun. That didn't seem right. I even tried flipping the sentence to "I live in a freezing house" and it still labelled "freezing" as a noun.

Edit: Thanks for all the great responses! I'm not used to being able to just talk about English like this with people. It's honestly incredibly exciting.

CJHLambert
  • 114
  • 7

7 Answers7

26

It's an adjective, a more intense equivalent of "cold" and opposite to "hot" or "stifling".

BoldBen
  • 1,190
  • 6
  • 6
  • It fails all the tests for adjectivehood, and hence is best classified as a VP. – BillJ Jan 27 '22 at 09:06
  • 35
    Disagree. The tests of adjectivehood you use seem arbitrary. To someone learning English, the first test of being an adjective is, "Does it modify a noun?" It directly modifies the noun "kitchenhouse", so it passes that test. Another would be, "Can I replace it with a known adjective?" "He will not see again the cold* kitchenhouse...*" works. – gotube Jan 27 '22 at 09:24
  • Aribitary? Of course it modifies "kitchenhouse" -- we know that -- but that doesn't mean it must be an adjective. A wide range of expressions can occur as pre-head modifier, but they are not all adjectives. That "freezing" can be replaced with an adjective like "cold" only proves it is a modifier; it does not accurately identify the part of speech it belongs to. It's vital to distinguish category (POS) and function. See my answer for more evidence. – BillJ Jan 27 '22 at 09:45
  • 5
    @BillJ There's a huge gulf between how the ESL and Linguistics worlds categorize things. For an ESL student, if the function of a word is to directly modify a noun, it's an adjective. I don't see how any of the tests you provide in your answer are practical tests for ESL students. – gotube Jan 28 '22 at 01:21
  • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. – gotube Jan 29 '22 at 23:46
  • @BillJ Moved to chat – gotube Jan 29 '22 at 23:48
20

Textbooks of English as a Second Language (ESL) call this an extreme adjective.

Extreme adjectives are adjectives with three features:

  1. They have an extreme meaning of a regular adjective.

"extremely cold" = "freezing"

  1. They cannot be compared.

It's 14° more freezing out there than in here.
Today is the most freezing day since 2002.

  1. They are modified by extreme adverbs, and not regular adverbs.

It's absolutely freezing.
It's utterly freezing.
BUT
It's very freezing.
It's rather freezing.
It's a little bit freezing.

gotube
  • 49,596
  • 7
  • 72
  • 154
  • 3
    This seems a standard term in ESL, e.g. in British Council's Learn English which has "freezing" as an example. I don't know if the term is widely used outside ESL, but this is English Language Learners, so it seems the right term. – Stuart F Jan 27 '22 at 09:45
  • 1
    I think it's a relatively simple thing to teach to non-linguistics people. Explaining it on your answer with "Below, asterisks in front of a sentence tells that the sentence is ungrammatical" sounds reasonable. It also helps to normalize it to other people, which is good =) Just like how it's now quite normalized to write not-equal as !=, taking it from programming. – justhalf Jan 28 '22 at 06:07
8

Wikipedia calls this a case of attributive verb, and more specifically a deverbal adjective:

An attributive verb is a verb that modifies (expresses an attribute of) a noun in the manner of an attributive adjective, rather than express an independent idea as a predicate.

Deverbal adjectives often have the same form as (and similar meaning to) the participles (that is, forms ending in -ing and -ed), but behave grammatically purely as adjectives — they do not take objects, for example, as a verb might. For example:

  • It was a very exciting game.

So in your sentence, freezing is a deverbal adjective modifying the noun kitchenhouse.

The freezing kitchenhouse means the kitchenhouse in which it is freezing (cold).

fev
  • 9,485
  • 2
  • 14
  • 40
4

"Freezing" is the present particle of "freeze". Participles are derived from verbs, but they act as adjectives. In the sentence you give, it's clearly modifying "kitchenhouse". What probably caused your software to mark it as a "noun" is that in English, gerunds take the same form as the present participle. Gerunds are also derived from verbs, but act as nouns. For instance, in the sentence "Freezing takes place at zero degrees Celsius", "freezing" is a gerund acting as a noun and serving as the subject of the verb "takes". Apparently whoever programmed the software saw that -ing forms can in some cases be gerunds, and simply had the software classify all such forms as "nouns". It seems that the software was not programmed with the fact in mind that morphologically identical words can be different parts of speech in different contexts. You might want to check whether it marks "dark" as an adjective (in that sentence, it's a noun).

Acccumulation
  • 6,086
  • 10
  • 13
0

It is an adjectival phrase formed from the participle of the verb "freeze". Also, the Stanford parser has been around for a long long time and does okay on typical sentences like this one; it correctly identifies "freezing" as "VBG (verb, gerund or present participle)" and that it adjectivally modifies "kitchenhouse". (See the Stanford dependencies manual linked from here.

user21820
  • 1,462
  • 12
  • 18
0

Aside from the main question, which has already been answered, I'd like to point out that standard syntax requires 'again' to be at the end of the sentence. Compare "I will never see you again" to "I will never see again you".

Spiritman
  • 111
  • 6
-3

He will not see again the freezing kitchenhouse in the predawn dark.

It's best classified as a verb modifying "kitchenhouse".

“Freezing” differs from participial adjectives in that:

(a) It can’t be modified by “very”: *A very freezing pond”.

(b) It can’t occur as complement to complex-intransitive verbs like become: *”It became quite freezing”.

(c) It can’t occur as complement to complex-transitive verbs like “find”: *”I found it quite freezing”.

The range of expressions that can occur as pre-head modifier to a noun is very large and varied: we don't want to call them all adjectives. “Freezing” doesn’t have the properties of indisputable adjectives and hence can’t belong in that class.

Other similar items include "sleeping" ("a sleeping child"), "gleaming" ("a gleaming showroom"), and "defeated" ("a defeated army").

BillJ
  • 16,811
  • 1
  • 16
  • 28
  • 12
    Both "It became freezing" and "I found it freezing" have numerous cites as stand-alone clauses in books.google.com, and I as a native speaker find them perfectly acceptable. – prosfilaes Jan 27 '22 at 16:51
  • "Freezing-cold" would be the preferred adjective. – BillJ Jan 27 '22 at 16:58
  • 5
    we don't want to call them all adjectives - I hope this isn't an embarrassing question, but: why not? – A. I. Breveleri Jan 27 '22 at 17:23
  • @A.I.Breveleri Because although they are modifiers, they are not adjectives. In addition to adjective phrases, pre-head noun modifiers can be DPs (determinative phrases), nominals, and VP (verb phrases). This is why the distinction between category (POS) and function is so important. – BillJ Jan 27 '22 at 18:33
  • 1
    Neither A, B nor C is absolutely true. “It’s not just freezing, it’s very freezing” is perfectly fine, as are the examples given in both B and C. “A very freezing pond” is at least borderline ungrammatical, but that’s because freezing in that sentence is an actual participle: it means ‘a pond which is in the process of freezing over’. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 27 '22 at 22:51
  • @JanusBahsJacquet "very freezing" sounds terrible, and if "freezing" has the verbal meaning, then it's 100% wrong as "very" does not modify verbs ever, only adjectives and adverbs. – gotube Jan 28 '22 at 01:16
  • 2
    In a figurative sense, I think it can work a bit more like an adjective: "I dove into the pond and, though the day was warm, I found the water absolutely freezing". Your first example is a little weird because it's not clear if freezing is meant in the sense of 'extremely cold' or 'solidifying'. – Matt Krause Jan 28 '22 at 01:26
  • 9
    Isn't the inability to use intensifiers more of a semantic question than a grammatical one? People also object to "very pregnant" and "quite unique", but I don't think that would preclude either of them from being adjectives. Isn't the objection here to "very" and "quite" more a semantic "it's either freezing or it's not", rather than a question of grammar? If one hypothetically allowed differing amounts of "freezing", then "It was freezing in December, but it became very freezing in January." would make perfect sense. – R.M. Jan 28 '22 at 04:08
  • @R.M. Consider the NP "a sleeping child". Now ask yourself whether "sleeping" is an adjective or something else. – BillJ Jan 28 '22 at 07:54
  • @gotube It doesn’t sound terrible to me – colloquial, perhaps, but perfectly normal. Not in the ‘freezing pond’ example, though, because there it’s clearly verbal. You can’t call it an ‘absolutely freezing pond’ either, but a ‘slowly freezing pond’ is fine. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 28 '22 at 08:46
  • Can "enormous" pass any of these tests: "A very enormous pond" , "It became quite enormous", "I found it quite enormous" – James K Jan 28 '22 at 20:51
  • @JamesK It certainly doesn't pass the first test. Is "enormous" a verb then? – gotube Jan 28 '22 at 21:39
  • You can coordinate freezing with unitss that are indisputably Adjective Phrases as in the [? freezing] and [AP very old] kitchenhouse. But there's no VP that you could use in a coordination – unless you enter a circular argument along the lines of "I can coordinate freezing and sleeping, and since I believe that sleeping is a VP, freezing also has to be a VP". – Schmuddi Jan 29 '22 at 10:54
  • 2
    You're basically claiming that there doesn't exist a class of deverbal adjectives. This is in very clear opposition to what any contemporary linguistic description of English word-formation has to say about the topic. Or do you have a source in which sleeping and freezing as pre-head modifiers are identified as verb phrases? – Schmuddi Jan 29 '22 at 11:16
  • I'm not claiming that at all. Some verbs can (by a type of conversion) form an adjective homonymous with the gerund-participle or past participle form of a verb. For example "entertaining", as in "an entertaining clown" passes the tests for adjectivehood. But others like "sleeping", as in "a sleeping child", fail the tests and are best classified as VPs. Similarly, "worried" as in "a worried man" passes the tests, but "defeated", as in "the defeated army" fails the tests and is best classified as a VP. – BillJ Jan 29 '22 at 15:05
  • 1
    And yet you can coordinate defeated, worried, and desperate as in the desperate, defeated, and worried army. It's one of the very basic syntactic principles that coordination conjoins units of equal syntactic status – how does that fit your analysis then? And who says that the three tests that you apply are necessary tests for adjective status? It's rather well-known that not every adjective is gradable (a), and that not every adjective can occur in predicative position (b). How can you defend your position so vehemently with so little evidence for verb status? – Schmuddi Jan 29 '22 at 20:17
  • Re. coordination: It's function that is the crucial factor. Consider “He won’t reveal [the nature of the threat] or [where it came from], where one coordinate is an NP and the other a subordinate interrogative clause. What makes that example acceptable despite the different categories is that each coordinate could occur alone with the same function: “He won’t reveal the nature of the threat” + “He won’t reveal where it came from”. Similarly, it is also possible to coordinate an AdjP with a non-finite clause, as in “He’s [known to have a gun] and [likely to use it]”. – BillJ Jan 30 '22 at 12:02
  • ... cont: In each pair, the non-coordinated expressions have the same function as those in the coordination, i.e. complement of the verb. In your example, the expressions "desperate", "defeated" and "worried" consist of two adjectives and a VP, but they all have the same function, i.e. that of modifier, so the coordination is acceptable. – BillJ Jan 30 '22 at 12:03