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Are nominal adjectives and fused-head noun phrase (e.g. "the poor") just two different ways of describing the same thing, or is one considered a subset of the other, or are they different types of classification? Aren't both ways of describing nominalization occurrences?

Or does nominal adjective just refer to the adjectival portion and a fused-head construction a more general classification that can include accompanying determiners?

Further, and related, is "beginning" (as in, "it was just the beginning") an example of using a present participle as an adjective and then as a nominal adjective/fused-head noun phrase.

David
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tangosquared
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  • Those were the beginnings, but these are the endings. – tchrist Sep 13 '20 at 22:09
  • @tchrist - Are you implying that the distinction between a true noun and a nominalization is that only the former can be made plural? – tangosquared Sep 13 '20 at 22:17
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    You certainly cannot make adjectives plural. If it's the truly angry who most concern us, this is different in any number of ways from the truly angries who are concerning us, especially because the latter is ungrammatical. :) – tchrist Sep 13 '20 at 23:27
  • So if someone asked you which fabric swatches you liked, and you responded, "I like the reds and the blues", you would not consider those normalized adjectives (or fused-head NPs), but true noun forms? – tangosquared Sep 14 '20 at 00:01
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    The term 'fused head' refers to the fusion of the head and a dependent item. In "the poor", the word "poor" retains its status as an adjective, but it is at the same time both head and modifier. I suppose you could call "poor" a nominal adjective, though 'fused head' is far more meaningful. In "It was just the beginning", "beginning" is a noun, not an adjective. – BillJ Sep 14 '20 at 07:42
  • @BillJ Thanks for that additional comment. Clearly in my example "the beginning" is a NP. But how does one determine that it isn't a fused head? Isn't "beginning" as in "the beginning event" a participle acting as an adjective? If so, why couldn't "beginning" in my example simply be a participle acting as an adjective, acting as a fused head? – tangosquared Sep 14 '20 at 15:25
  • As far as I'm aware ing adjectives cannot be fused modifier-heads – BillJ Sep 14 '20 at 16:29
  • @BillJ If not, then what role is "banking" in a phrase like the "the banking of my funds" or "softening" in the "the softening of the crust"? – tangosquared Sep 14 '20 at 16:59
  • @tangosquared They are nouns not adjectives."The banking of my funds" is a noun phrase with the noun "banking" as head and the prep phrase "of my funds" as its complement. – BillJ Sep 15 '20 at 05:54
  • @BillJ I agree "banking" in my example is not functioning as an adjective and instead as a noun, but I am trying to understand whether that is purely a nominalization of the present participle (and thereby likely a gerund) or whether that is first a transformation to a fused-head; e.g. "beginning" (present participle) => "the beginning" (fused-head). Apparently that's not a part of the classification process and instead, the verb form can transition directly to being regarded as a noun. – tangosquared Sep 15 '20 at 17:35
  • There's certainly no fused-head construction here. The 'transition', as you put it, is a matter of conversion where the ing) noun is formed by conversion from the gerund-participle ing form of the verb (not from the base form) form. Such ing nouns are sometimes referred to as gerundial nouns. – BillJ Sep 16 '20 at 11:13

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