[General] Adjective or Adverb?

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sunyoyo

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The dragon stood 12-feet tall over the belittled house

Ok... so is 12-feet tall an adjective or adverb?
Is it an adjective, since it describes how tall the dragon is?
But how about standing 12-feet tall (maybe it's crouching and not using his total height) ?

How to explain that it's an adjective since it doesn't come directly before or after the noun it's modifying? It's actually coming after the verb (stood) which makes it look more of an adverb?


Then I get the answer but i am not sure whether it is right or not.
"The dragon stood 12-feet tall over the belittled house" We can make an analysis on its sentence structure and you will be clear.
"the dragon"(an article+noun)is the subject. "stood" is the verb(a intransitive verb). 12-feet is a numeral-classifier compound. "Tall" here is a adjective. So the 12-feet is used as a adverb of degree for the abjective"tall'. The part "12-feet tall" here is an appositive for the subject "the dragon". "over the belittled house" is an adverbial of place.

But then I came across another one: "He slides open the box and find a loftek mini keyboard from lktown.". who can tell me what component "slide" and "open" are in the sentence?
 

philo2009

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Your problem is that you're attempting to analyse a very poorly constructed sentence! (Are you certain that it was written by a native?)

In the first place 'belittled' would not be used to describe a building: it means 'made to look figuratively (not literally) small'.

In the second, the statement that something is 'X feet tall' is a statement about its absolute height (from its bottom to its top), not its height relative to some other object on the ground. For the latter case, we would say 'stand/tower/... X feet above/over...' without 'tall'.

However, in case it may be of help to you in terms of general analysis, in both

He is six feet tall.

and (somewhat less natural, but still possible)

He stands six feet tall.

the underlined part is an adjective phrase (consisting of head 'tall' modified by adverbial objective 'six feet') serving as a subject-complement.

Regarding

He slides the box open.

adjective 'open' serves as an object-complement. ('Slides' is, of course, a verb...)
 

sunyoyo

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Thank you so much.
 
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