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Taking these classifications from Oxford's Lexico:

Edwin Ashworth
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peisander
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    I'm not seeing the term 'brick house' on the page you link. Can you clarify your assumptions? – Spagirl Mar 24 '22 at 14:30
  • @Spagirl I'm not sure that matters. It does have "brick saw" which is the same type of phrase. – Laurel Mar 24 '22 at 14:43
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    @Laurel It does actually matter. We shouldn't have to go to another site to fully understand a question. The relevant parts of the definition should be excerpted, and the author should explain whether the issue is that there is no definition for "brick" as an adjective, or whether the issue arose from the fact there was an example sentence under the definition of brick as a noun. Not because we can't figure it out, but because that information makes the question more discoverable. – ColleenV Mar 24 '22 at 14:47
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    "Plastic" is also a noun. – philipxy Mar 25 '22 at 07:37
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    @Laurel, genuine question, is it the same kind of phrase? in 'brick house' brick describes what the house is made of, but in 'brick saw' it tells us what it is made for. – Spagirl Mar 25 '22 at 10:15
  • @ColleenV The issue is that there is no definition for "brick" as an adjective. – peisander Mar 25 '22 at 14:34
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    @philipxy: A noun which is mostly used to describe materials that are, ironically, not plastic(adj). – supercat Mar 25 '22 at 15:53
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    On a related note, compare & contrast "air pump", "air rifle", and "air guitar". – PM 2Ring Mar 25 '22 at 15:54
  • @Spagirl Grammatically, they are both "brick + noun" (unlike the other examples using brick on its own). What I'm saying is, does it matter in the sense that the question needs to be clarified? Any perceived difference you see seems like something that should be addressed in an answer. The question is perfectly clear to me. – Laurel Mar 25 '22 at 16:09
  • I can show you a "brick", but I cannot show you a "plastic". In this usage, "brick" is an enumerable object, "plastic" is not. – waltinator Mar 26 '22 at 00:35
  • You get what you deserve when you try to look up grammatical information in a dictionary! – Araucaria - Him Mar 26 '22 at 17:34

4 Answers4

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This may have been addressed here before, but the overall answer is 'there is no consensus as to when certain words should be considered attributive nouns, and when they should be considered to have converted fully to adjectives', obviously in these instances used prenominally. 'Steel bridge' is a famous case in issue.

Nordquist at ThoughtCo discusses this issue:

  • "Webster's New International Dictionary . . . does not call every noun capable of attributive use an adjective but some like cash, land, mind etc. are labeled 'n(oun) often attrib(utive).'

However, the distinction between words that are 'n often attrib' and words that are 'adj' is not precise, as the editors themselves claim . . .. Moreover, even one author may provide different explanations for similar cases. Gove (1964:165), for example, considers the word zero in zero modification an adjective in the light of its attributive and predicative uses, despite the fact that it neither inflects for degree nor admits adverbial modification. However, surprisingly enough, for macaroni salad, apparently similar to the zero modification example, he argues that there appears to be a 'strong feeling' against macaroni as an adjective."

The usual tests for adjectives include gradability and intensifiability, but just as 'steel' in 'steel bridge' fails this

  • *a steeler bridge
  • *a very steel bridge

so does the obvious classifying adjective 'nuclear'

  • *a more nuclear reactor
  • *a very nuclear explosion.

For particular classifications, only asking say the compilers why they chose contrasting POSs for apparently identical usages will begin to resolve the question.

But checking in the usual respectable dictionaries (in particular AHD, Collins, RHK Webster's, Lexico, M-W, CD, Longmans, Macmillan) for POS assignment of 'plastic', all concur that full conversion to the adjective has now occurred, even for the basic 'made of plastic' ('plastic spoon') sense.

But for 'brick', Merriam-Webster has 'noun, often attributive', Collins calls the usage 'noun as modifier', and Lexico and Macmillan also list 'a brick wall' under [noun]. CD is, I'd say, unclear (though gives 'red-brick houses' under [noun]). AHD and Longman seem not to address the issue, but do not list adjective usages. However RHK Webster's classifies 'brick' in the senses 'made of, constructed with, or resembling bricks' [adjective].

Edwin Ashworth
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    Plastic is also a "true" adjective in its other senses: "that moulds" e.g. plastic art and "generating ideas; creative" e.g., a plastic imagination (OED) – DjinTonic Mar 24 '22 at 14:54
  • If so, it's converted from the original noun usage, and as stated above linguists disagree on when certain words / senses can be said to have made this breakthrough. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 24 '22 at 15:00
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    Linguists may disagree, but The Academy decides. – John Lawler Mar 24 '22 at 15:46
  • "Very nuclear" sounds somewhat less unacceptable than "very steel". – Lawrence Mar 24 '22 at 17:42
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    There's no doubt that in the NP "a brick wall", "brick" is a nominal consisting of a noun; likewise "cotton" in "a cotton shirt". And probably "plastic" too, as in "a plastic pipe". – BillJ Mar 24 '22 at 18:00
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    Thank you for another one of your positive contributions. I think this answer nails the issue: it reflects on the issue at a higher level, instead of assuming simple criteria or copying judgements from works of reference, as some linguists do. Linguistics is often 'soft' and not an exact, experimental science. – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Mar 24 '22 at 18:25
  • Perhaps you'd like to make that less opinionative, @Lawrence. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 24 '22 at 19:34
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    I gave this +1 despite the missed opportunity to write “nuclearer” while still saying something intelligent. – Todd Wilcox Mar 24 '22 at 22:58
  • Test ❶: Can you modify brick or plastic with an adjective that applies only to them not to some noun that follows them? When you have a fake brick house, the house is real but the brick is fake, so the brick can only be an attributive noun there. Test ❷: Can you use these prospective adjectives predicatively, not just attributively? If those are predicate adjectives, then the bridge is steel, the spoon is plastic, the house is brick “should” (necessary ʙᴜᴛ ɴᴏᴛ sufficient) all read ok. Yet the bridge is stainless steel, the spoon is crumbling plastic, the house is fake brick disproves. – tchrist Mar 25 '22 at 01:22
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    @EdwinAshworth Recent years have seen various non-standard phrasings such as adding "not" to the end of a positive statement to negate it theatrically. "Very [noun phrase]" is one of them, used in a context such as "This is very you". Not all noun phrases work well with this construction, but nuclear seems to work better than steel. "Very Michigan" and "very '60s" sound better than "very bicycle" or "very wall". – Lawrence Mar 25 '22 at 02:16
  • @Lawrence interesting observation. I wonder what causes this distinction between Michigan and bicycle. Is it the ease of identifying the stereotypical attribute? – justhalf Mar 25 '22 at 05:24
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    IMO, the reason "very you", "very 60s" and "very Michigan" sound fine is because "you", "the 60s" and "Michigan" are identities - there is only one you, one decade called the 60s, and one Michigan - whereas there are many bicycles with different identities. Saying something is "very Michigan" means it is somehow specific to Michigan (or styles associated with Michigan) as opposed to other cities (i.e. other things of the same type as Michigan). In contrast, "very bicycle" doesn't sound right, because a quality cannot be specific to "bicycle" as opposed to... other bicycles? – kaya3 Mar 25 '22 at 08:57
  • @kaya3 I was halfway through a disagreeing comment about "very nuclear" when I realized that nuclear is always an adjective. You can't go to the store and say "Please give me five nuclears." – Ross Presser Mar 25 '22 at 13:14
  • @Lawrence Like my previous comment, I don't think "nuclear" is ever a noun. – Ross Presser Mar 25 '22 at 13:15
  • @Ross Presser Sorry; there I've got to disagree. In power generation usages, 'We will make use of gas, oil and nuclear' shows a local conversion. But in 'a coal-fired / nuclear power station', the adjective persists. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 25 '22 at 16:45
  • @RossPresser Good point. The noun is nucleus. – Lawrence Mar 25 '22 at 17:29
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    Dictionary.com: 'nuclear ... ... ... [noun] [informal] nuclear energy: 'switching to nuclear as a power source.' ' Ditto Collins. Ditto, without the 'informal' caveat, Wiktionary. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 25 '22 at 19:11
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    OK, so it's transitioning as of this generation I guess. I doubt it would be considered correct in the 1940s. – Ross Presser Mar 27 '22 at 17:59
  • This is a fantastic answer! – JΛYDΞV Mar 28 '22 at 00:24
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The use of the word "plastic" as an adjective, and even the phrase "plastic surgery", substantially predate the invention of the materials which are commonly called "plastics", and the use of "plastic" as a noun referring to such materials. It's perhaps somewhat ironic that some of the first materials which were called "plastics", such as Bakelite (invented in 1907), weren't really very plastic at all once formed but were in fact quite brittle, unlike plasticine which was invented twenty years earlier.

I think the term "plastic" should properly be thought of as being an attributive noun when it is referring to a brittle synthetic resin, and an adjective when describing a characteristic of a material (e.g. "heat the object until it starts to become plastic") or process (e.g. "plastic deformation", "plastic surgery", etc.). While the primary usage of the word would be as an attributive noun, it can also be used as an adjective in a way that "brick" cannot.

Incidentally, a further distinction between meanings can be illustrated by considering the effect of the adverb "more". Saying something is "more plastic" would be more flexible but less elastic. To describe an object which is not flexible as being more like the synthetic resins which are commonly called "plastics", one would instead say "more plasticky".

supercat
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    A "hard plastic spoon" makes sense as a spoon made of hard plastic. A "hard, plastic spoon" would be correct if "plastic" were being used as an adjective, but to me this usage suggests the earlier usages of "plastic" meaning more or less "soft". It would of course be difficult to make a hard spoon out of plastic that was not hard. – Peter Mar 26 '22 at 06:26
  • 'X should be considered a noun (etc) when ...' becomes an untenable stance when conversion occurs. 'Funnest' and increasingly 'funner' are now considered acceptable, obviously the superlative and comparative of a new adjective. English is plastic. – Edwin Ashworth Apr 02 '22 at 18:30
  • @EdwinAshworth: I was somewhat bummed, though, when I was playing Scrabble against the computer and it wouldn't accept "SLANTIER" as a valid word, even though it does accept e.g. "brownier" as a comparative form of "browny", an adjective meaning "somewhat brown". On the flip side, the term "via" is often used in electronics-related technical writing as a noun meaning "plated through-hole connection", with the plural form "vias", but OSPD doesn't recognize that usage either. – supercat Apr 02 '22 at 19:02
  • I'm not at all sure that OSPD is seen as a recognised authority on ELU. But arguments start when AHD say calls a usage that of a 'noun' while R H K Webster's considers it now to be that of an 'adjective'. We have to look for papers/articles on the subject, for instance the views of Denison in Pastor Gómez' Nominal Modifiers in Noun Phrase Structure: Evidence from Contemporary English. – Edwin Ashworth Apr 03 '22 at 18:15
  • @EdwinAshworth: My intended point was that the question of what prefix-stem-suffix combinations are "words" is rather vague, and offer examples where an entity that tries to reasonably judge such things may not make such distinctions the same way as a typical reader. – supercat Apr 05 '22 at 17:50
  • Dictionaries (even Grand Ol' OED) are often considered really inadequate (contrast respected grammars such as CGEL) when it comes to attributing POS correctly. Though most have conceded the existence of determiners/determinatives in the last decade or so. And as the article I linked to indicates, the real experts in these areas don't always agree. // As regards wordness, OED has about 2/3 m, while famously the 1m mark was claimed to have been reached a few years ago. Wiktionary has the greatest number, though some think it's not adequately vetted. – Edwin Ashworth Apr 05 '22 at 18:50
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It's a brick house because it is made out of bricks, which are objects. It is not saying the house is 'bricky'.

Consider the difference between 'a wooden house' and 'a log house'. Logs are objects. Wood is not.

Richard Longley
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  • A paper airplane is made out of paper. But Lexico (https://www.lexico.com/definition/paper) does not give any definition of "paper" as an adjective. – peisander Apr 02 '22 at 04:30
  • @peisander: I'm a bit surprised that "paper" wouldn't have a definition as an adjective describing a lack of substantial and reliable value, as used in such expressions as "paper tiger" or "paper promises". Note that the phrase "paper promise" doesn't merely describe promise which is expressed in paper form (i.e. a contract), but rather a promise which is likely to be breached and is unlikely to be usefully enforceable. Otherwise, I think there's a presumption that if someone sees a reference to e.g. a "macguffium statue", and the only definition for "macguffium" describes a material... – supercat Apr 05 '22 at 19:32
  • ...they would interpret the word as an attributive adjective meaning "made of macguffium", even if the dictionary contains no such definition. If a dictionary had some other definition of the word as an adjective, then it should also explicitly include a "made of macguffium" definition, but otherwise it would be pointless to try to guess whether anyone had used the name of each possible material as an attributive adjective. – supercat Apr 05 '22 at 19:34
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"Brick house" and "plastic bucket" differ through context, not gramattic form. If one is made of, and the other is meant for containing, they're different.

For example, "a wooden shed" is built of and a "wood shed" is built to contain wood.

Moving away, "a brick bucket" might mean a smaller bucket containing small bricks in a toy-box, or a bigger one containing bigger bricks on a building site, but never a bucket made of brick.

Robbie Goodwin
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