The plural form of adjectives in poetry and lyrics

[Ali1002]

Hello there! I know that the adjectives cannot be made countable but I saw the adjectives like beautiful in plural form as "the beautifuls" somewhere especially in poetry and lyrics. Is this style of writing correct? If the answer is negative, how can write this kind of adjectives in plural? For example, in my case, "The beautifuls are the unfaithfuls".

 

[Raymott]

Can you give some actual examples, given that you've seen them?
"The beautiful and unfaithful"
"The Young and the Restless"
"The Bold and the Beautiful"

Adjectives don't take a plural form. The above refers to either one or more than one person.

 

[Roman55]

And are therefore nouns.

 

[Ali1002]

Can you give some actual examples, given that you've seen them?
"The beautiful and unfaithful"
"The Young and the Restless"
"The Bold and the Beautiful"

Adjectives don't take a plural form. The above refers to either one or more than one person.

For example, 'Between the beautifuls' is a Canadian studio album by Hawks Workman, or 'The Queen of the beautifuls is back' is a TV show, (I guess, it is a TV show)

 

[Ali1002]

If they were nouns, they would take a plural ending.

Thank you, So, the beautiful might have been a noun, right? I mean, can we use the beautiful as a noun?

 

[teechar]

The word "people" is implied at the end.
The beautiful people.
The desperate people.
That makes them a truncated noun phrase (my nomenclature!).

 

[Ali1002]

The word "people" is implied at the end.
The beautiful people.
The desperate people.
That makes them a truncated noun phrase (my nomenclature!).

Accordingly, I correct my own sentence in this way, "The beautiful people are the unfaithful people"

 

[Rover_KE]

You forgot the final punctuation mark.:-(

 

[teechar]

"The beautiful people are the unfaithful people."

That's grammatical, but why on Earth would being unfaithful make one beautiful?!

 

[Roman55]

If they were nouns, they would take a plural ending.

I don't think that's the acid test of whether something is a noun or not.

Young is a noun, and I'm surprised at the objection to it as such. So are the rich, the poor and so on, all without a final s.

I think that the words in post #2 are in the same category.

 

[Ali1002]

That's grammatical, but why on Earth would being unfaithful make one beautiful?!

Oh, No! I don't want to make such a generalized label to all beautiful people. Certainly, not all the people people are unfaithful, it's just a metaphor in poem. The beauty is a subjective thing and I believe that the all people are beautiful.

 

[Tdol]

However we classify the terms, "The beautifuls are the unfaithfuls" doesn't work.

 

[jutfrank]

In 'the beautiful', beautiful is not a noun. It can be modified by an adverb, for example, extremely; it can show degrees - the more beautiful and the most beautiful; and it does not add a plural suffix. It is an adjective.

Does this mean that in, say, The good die young, you would neither consider The good a noun phrase since it contains no noun? If not, what kind of phrase is it? It can certainly be replaced by a pronoun, and also contains a determiner.

How about The Chinese are coming? Is The Chinese similarly not a noun phrase?

If these words are nominalised adjectives, then surely that makes nouns, right? If they're functioning as nouns, then they're nouns. I find it strange to see it any other way.

The only other way I can make sense of this is that they are noun phrases with an implied head, which seems reasonable, I think.

 

[teechar]

Oh, No! I don't want to make such a [STRIKE]generalized label to[/STRIKE] generalization about all beautiful people. Certainly, not all [STRIKE]the people[/STRIKE] beautiful people are unfaithful; it's just a metaphor in a poem. [STRIKE]The[/STRIKE] Beauty is a subjective thing, and I believe that [STRIKE]the[/STRIKE] all people are beautiful.

Yes, indeed. As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I'm actually curious about the poem you mention. What does it say? Can you explain it to us?

 

[Roman55]

They are not nouns. They can have comparative and superlative forms, and they can me modified by adverbs.

When they're adjectives they can be, but not when they're nouns. How do you modify young with an adverb in the phrase, the educated young of today? (It can be found at #9 here under the heading noun, by the way.)

 

[GoesStation]

For example, 'Between the beautifuls' is a Canadian studio album by Hawks Workman, or 'The Queen of the beautifuls is back' is a TV show, (I guess, it is a TV show)

Writers sometimes take liberties with the language for effect, especially in poetry and lyrics. For example, a film came out a few years ago called Inglourious Basterds, with both words intentionally misspelled.

 

[jutfrank]

You are confusing form (word class/part of speech) and function (subject, object, complement).

We're back here again. It is my belief that others are doing this. Let me explain how I see things.

Your view is apparently that it is possible to have a noun phrase that does not contain a noun. There are some problems with this view that I can see. It seems to me that if you want to define formal classes like 'adjective' or noun phrase, then you must describe the formal properties only, not the functionality. To do otherwise would surely be to confuse form and function. I wonder how you would attempt to define 'adjective' or 'noun phrase' without relation to what they do?

Another view is that all noun phrases contain a noun, and so Chinese is a noun. After all, the reason why we don't say Chineses or Englishes is purely phonological not grammatical—we allow Italians/Germans, etc. This view is appealing in that it places greater importance on meaning and function than on form. In language, as in most other areas, form follows function. For this reason, I think this view is more sensible for teachers and learners, for whom word class relates to what words do as much as the morphology. Teachers tend to say things like "It's a noun functioning as an adjective" or "A gerund is a verb form functioning as a noun or in this case "Chinese is an adjective functioning as a noun." In my experience, this kind of analysis makes sense to learners.

A third view that I'm quite fond of is that a noun phrase may contain a noun by implication, (e.g. The Chinese [people]). I'm not aware of anybody holding this view, and I don't think it would appeal to grammarians at all, but I think it makes sense.

 

[Roman55]

Well, we could use very. We could also use the adjective prefix un-.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you mean. I thought you were saying that young was an adjective and I was saying that it was a noun in the phrase, the educated young of today. Do you mean that it would become the educated very young of today? And where do you want to use un-? If it's to make the word uneducated, that doesn't change anything.

 

[jutfrank]

Fine, but that does concede that the word before the implied noun is indeed an adjective.

Yes, sure.

 

[jutfrank]

Let's try to break this down a bit. First:

We allow Italians and Germans because these words are both adjectives and nouns.

1) In what respect would you consider Italians an adjective, having a plural 's' as it does? I take it you mean Italian?

2) Are you really saying that Italian is both a noun and an adjective in form? What is it about the form that determines this? If you're looking at the morphology, it has an adjective suffix. But what makes it formally a noun? The fact that it can transform into the plural form Italians? Or the fact that it can be preceded by a determiner, for example? If I refer to your new shirt as "very you", what word class is you?

3) If you mean that the word belongs independently to two classes irrespective of an instance of language in context, does this mean that even in the phrase Italian brogues, the word Italian is still both a noun and an adjective?

4) Or do you mean that the word can be either an adjective or a noun? Then wouldn't that depend on its use/function in a phrase, not on the form? If not, then what would determine the class?

Incidentally, Chinese as the name of a language is a noun.

Always? How about in the phrase Chinese characters, where the word Chinese clearly refers to the language. How about English in the English language?

Look at these differences between the a and the b/c sentences. :

1a. My sister is going out with a German/an Italian.
1b. *My sister is going out with a Chinese/a Dutch.
1c. *My sister is going out with a wealthy/rich.

2a. Germans/Italians are very friendly.
2b. *Chineses/Dutches are very friendly.
2c, *Wealthy/Rich are very friendly

3a. *The German/Italian are very friendly.
3b. The Chinese/Dutch are very friendly.
3c. The wealthy/rich are very friendly.

4a. Let's hear a German's/an Italian's views on this.
4b. *Let's hear a Chinese's/A Dutch's views on this.
4c. *Let's hear a wealthy's/rich's views on this.

Sorry, I don't get the point here. Of course, I understand all that.

There is no obvious phonological reason for not having *Swisses, *Welshes, *Dutches, *Chineses.

To me, it is obvious. Why else would it be (mostly) only those words ending in certain sounds that are irregular in this way? I don't know the exact historical explanation off-hand but I'm confident it's phonological. I could try to find out. So when we say The Chinese are coming, this is a semantically equivalent statement to The Italians are coming, in that we conceive in both a group of people, so where's the grammatical difference?

And it has become quite common to speak of Englishes when we are speaking of types of language.

I don't see the connection. Of course I'm not suggesting that you can't pluralise words ending in -sh. Englishes means varieties of English. In the same way, you could say Chineses, referring to varieties of Chinese.