Talk:blazing

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This page originally listed an adjective, which I removed. Razorflame questioned this, and pointed out that I should bring it up on the discussion page, which is quite reasonable. Blazing, like most participle verbs may be used to modify other words, particularly nouns (e.g., a blazing afternoon) and as Razorflame point out, it also modifies adjectives (e.g., blazing hot).

Grade school grammar gives us the simplified explanation that an adjective is a word that modifies a noun. Linguists long ago showed that this kind of definition is far too broad and results in untenable situations such as faculty being called an adjective because teachers hang out in the faculty office.

To overcome this, linguists have examined the behaviour of many words and have found a set of characteristics that are typical of one category of words which include prototypical adjectives such as hot, big, happy, nice, and another set that is typical of prototypical verbs such as run, do, eat, jump, etc. Not every adjective or verb has all the characteristics, but when considering whether a word is an adjective or a verb, the following tests should be considered (it should also be remembered that some words such as interesting belong to both categories.):

  1. If the word has an object or predicate complement, it's a verb in that context.
  2. If the word can function as predicate complement to seem, become, appear, look, or remain, it exists as an adjective (e.g., it seems interesting vs. *it seems blazing).
  3. If the word can be modified by very or too, it exists as an adjective. (e.g., it's very hot vs. *it's very blazing).

In the particular case of blazing, the first test is irrelevant because the verb blaze is usually intransitive. The second and third tests argue strongly for a verb interpretation.

Interestingly Rf's example blazing hot does not support the idea that blazing is an adjective because adjectives do not typically modify other adjectives. But it does bring up another possibility: that blazing is an adverb. I can't, however, find any evidence of other dictionaries taking this analysis, and I don't really feel it's sound.--Brett 19:16, 5 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Fair enough to me. Thanks for the explanation! I really feel like I've learned something today! Cheers, Razorflame 19:46, 5 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]