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From: muffy@lll-crg.ARPA (Muffy Barkocy)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Why the vax, but not the Unix??
Message-ID: <646@lll-crg.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 17-Jun-85 00:33:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: lll-crg.646
Posted: Mon Jun 17 00:33:35 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 18-Jun-85 04:47:36 EDT
References: <27400001@gypsy.UUCP> <546@hou2b.UUCP> <2061@sdcrdcf.UUCP>
Reply-To: muffy@lll-crg.UUCP (Muffy Barkocy)
Organization: Lawrence Livermore Labs, CRG group
Lines: 26

In article <2061@sdcrdcf.UUCP> barryg@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Lee Gold) writes:
>Unfortunately, answering that UNIX is an adjective doesn't solve the problem.
>In this language, it's perfectly proper to use adjectives as nouns.  It's
>called metonymy (I think) in poetics, but my Linguistics prof just called
>it function shift to say stuff like "floating in the blue" or "Things are
>sunny" or "Black is beautiful."
>
>As you'll notice from the above example, SOME adjectives take "the" and
>some don't.  Unfortuntely I only took a couple of classes in Linguistics.
>Maybe someone else can summarize which adjectives do/don't and why.
>
>--Lee Gold


With the examples you've given, nothing is proven.  "Things are sunny"
has the adjective "sunny" modifying the noun "things," "sunny" does *not*
become a noun.  I believe I was told that it is called a "predicate
adjective."  In the example "floating in the blue,"  I would assume that
this is a truncation of "floating in the blue sea,"  ust as "out of the
blue" is actually "out of the blue sky (out of nowhere)."

I would agree with previous posters, that it is "UNIX" rather than "the
UNIX" because of intangibility.  Just as we say "he has integrity" rather
than "he has the integrity."

                  Muffy