Talk:regulated
Add topicLatest comment: 14 years ago by Tenmei in topic Verb + adjective?
Verb + adjective?
[change]At Wiktionary:Simple talk#Regulated, a question was raised:
- By the way, regulated is a verb, not an adjective. Yes, it's used as a modifier, but that doesn't make it an adjective.--Brett (talk) 21:26, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
The dictionaries I checked agree with Brett; but the definitions I found were not written in a way which includes phrases like "regulated trade" or "unregulated trade." The examples of the word in specific sentences make me believe it is a verb and an adjective as well.
I don't know how to handle this? --Tenmei (talk) 00:27, 2 April 2010 (UTC)
- There are a number of ways to test whether a word belongs to the category of verb or adjective. If it is modifiable by very, then it is not a verb. So we have the adjective I'm very interested in that and the verb *that very interested me (the * means it's ungrammatical). If we apply this test to the NP regulated trade, we get very regulated trade, which strikes me as ungrammatical. If you do a corpus search on the BNC, there are no instances of very regulated. The 450 million words COCA has 5 hits, an the Time corpus has only 1 hit, for a total of about 1 hit per hundred million words. So, I think it fails this test.
- Another test is that adjectives can function as predicate complements to seem (e.g., he seemed happy), but participles can't (e.g. *he seemed killed). Again my sense is that the industry seemed regulated is ungrammatical. This time, there are no hits in the three corpora I checked. So, again, regulated fails to behave as any self-respecting adjective would.
- Altogether, then, it seems safe to say that regulated displays none of the properties that distinguish adjectives from participles, and so should be considered a verb and a verb only.--Brett (talk) 01:44, 2 April 2010 (UTC)
- Thank you. This explanation is helpful. Your suggested strategies will be useful in parsing similar problems which are likely to develop in the future. I appreciate the time you invested in helping me understand. --Tenmei (talk) 03:46, 2 April 2010 (UTC)