I am a competent user of English. worth has always perplexed me. It is an adjective, like say 'red'.
One does not say however "you are not red it" or "what is your red?"
in my native language to my knowledge, all adjectives behave the same.
The lexico-syntactic status of
worth has been controversial among linguists. In the major 1985 comprehensive English grammar (Quirk
et al.'s
A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language),
worth was analyzed as a preposition (and, yes, also a noun); but in the major 2002 comprehensive English grammar (Huddleston and Pullum's
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language),
worth was analyzed as an adjective (and, yes, also a noun).
Quirk
et al.'s argument for
worth being a preposition is that "it can govern a noun phrase [
San Francisco is worth frequent visits], a nominal
-ing clause with a genitive subject [
San Francisco is worth your visiting frequently], and a nominal relative clause [
The bicycle is not worth what you paid for it] (but not a
that-clause or a
to-infinitive clause" (note
[c], p. 1064).
Huddleston and Pullum's argument for
worth being an adjective is that it can occur as a complement to the linking verb
become ("
What might have been a $200 first edition suddenly became [worth perhaps 10 times that amount]" (p. 607) and that it needs an implied subject when it appears in the position of an introductory prepositional phrase. They give the following two examples (p. 607). The asterisk before the second one shows that they deem it ungrammatical:
[Worth over a million dollars,] the jewels were kept under surveillance by a veritable army of security guards.
*[Worth over a million dollars,] there'll be ample opportunity for a lavish lifestyle.
is there another word used similarly to worth?
Yes. According to Huddleston and Pullum, there are precisely three other words like it—the adjectives
due, like, and
unlike—each of which accepts a noun-phrase complement. I would note that none of those other three words is quite as special as
worth. Sentences containing predicates with
worth + -
ing-clause complements can have as their subject the direct object of the -
ing-clause complement. This is not true of the other words on their list.
The unexamined life is not worth living _.
*The unexamined life is not like living _.
*The unexamined life is not due living _.
I personally think that the adjective
unbecoming (as in
It was conduct [unbecoming an officer]) belongs in the group that Huddleston and Pullum has given.