Number Part of Speech

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Sylvia Lyons calling from Middleborough, Massachusetts.

Hi, Sylvia. Welcome.

How are you doing?

I am fine. Thank you so much for taking my call.

Happy to. How can we help you?

Well, we’re a homeschooling family, and so we actually have discussions about grammar at the dinner table.

Oh, wow. That’s great. How many kids are we talking about?

Well, we have eight, but we only have four at home now.

And so the oldest one at home, she’s a junior in high school, and actually the one who is probably the most passionate about grammar.

She’s a freshman at college this year.

Excellent.

And the question, one of the questions that she’s had, and she comments on occasionally is about numbers.

And she’s wondered regularly whether numbers are nouns or whether they’re adjectives.

And I actually have looked this up in dictionaries, and they are listed both as numbers and as adjectives.

But she feels really strongly that they can’t be adjectives, because she says, well, you can’t look out the window and say, oh, those are really lovely nine clouds.

Because if they’re adjectives, you know, they must be like a special class of adjectives.

So she’s really wondering, well, what part of speech then would numbers be?

That’s a great question.

And I love that you’re discussing it around the dinner table with four kids.

Which dictionaries did you look it up in, if I may ask, out of professional curiosity?

Well, I went to an online dictionary.

We actually don’t keep too many paper dictionaries around anymore.

We have a lot of books in our house.

I bet.

This is handled a lot of different ways in a bunch of different dictionaries.

I’ve worked for at least three different dictionary publishers as a dictionary editors.

And this topic comes up every time that you start a brand new line of dictionaries.

What are we going to call our parts of speech?

Because you learn certain parts of speech at the basic level of grammar, right?

Nouns and adjectives and adverbs and verbs and so forth.

But it turns out that when you get deeper into language, that these boundaries between them are very unclear.

Nouns, for example, can be attributive.

We can talk about a school bus.

Well, what is school doing there?

It’s a noun in front of a noun.

A radio show.

Yeah, a radio show.

They’re kind of behaving like adjectives, but they’re not.

So we call them attributive nouns because they lend a little bit of their connotation to the word that follows.

And so we can go through English again and again and find a lot more stuff like that.

We can talk about the American flag as the red, white, and blue.

Well, red, white, and blue are adjectives, and yet we’re treating them together as a noun.

How can that be?

And again and again in English, we run into these things.

It’s part of the reason that nouns easily become verbs, and verbs easily become nouns.

It’s just one of those strange things.

One of the dictionaries I worked for didn’t even call, they called them determiners, called numbers determiners.

Just skipped the question altogether.

Other dictionaries don’t call them nouns or adjectives.

They call them simply cardinal or ordinal numbers, depending whether you’re doing 12 or 12, for example.

And it’s a way around it.

12s are definitely a special class in language.

They deserve special attention.

A dictionary is only the starting point.

I think if your daughter’s really keen to get into this, I highly encourage her to look up some of the stuff that we’re talking about today.

There are infinite number of books and papers and even lectures online that she can find that will talk at length about where the separation from part of speech should be placed.

Think about it this way.

Where does blue stop and purple begin if you’re looking at a spectrum?

This is exactly the same problem when we think about the difference between adjectives and nouns and different parts of speech.

That is really interesting.

I had never thought about that.

I always kind of assumed that it was really a rather black or white thing, whether it’s nouns or verbs.

That is really, really interesting.

Who knew?

Yeah.

Who knew?

It sounds like you’ve got a wonky family, and bless you all, because it’s wonderful.

My house is also full of books.

We talk about grammar at the table, too.

But if she’s really into it, she can make a whole life and career of getting to the bottom of this and trying to figure it out.

It’s interesting stuff for the brain.

Yes. Well, thank you so much.

You should at least invite Grant over for dinner. I think you all can have a blast.

Well, I’m sure it would be so fun to cook a meal.

Thank you so much, Sylvia. Best of luck to you.

All right.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Call us with your language questions at Come Up Around the Dinner Table, 877-929-9673.