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This stems from a discussion over on ELL which has moved beyond being useful to second-language learners. In short, consider the sentence:

It weighs about 5 pounds.

What part of speech is "about?"

Since the verb "weigh" is not having any effect on the "about five pounds," I think it must be intransitive. That leaves the "about five pounds" as a long adverbial phrase, modifying the verb, right?

If that is correct, then isn't "about" an adverb modifying the adverbial noun "pounds?"

Would the answer hold true if we were talking about the price tag on something?:

This shirt costs about 5 pounds.

FumbleFingers
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Adam
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  • Why do you think it might NOT be an adverb? What's the confusion here? – Tushar Raj May 20 '15 at 06:33
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    And so the question is mis-titled. It is only about the function of "about". It has nothing to do with whether the verb is intransitive. – Brian Hitchcock May 20 '15 at 06:44
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    "about" modifies "5", not "pounds". – a better oliver May 20 '15 at 08:51
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    You need a sandwich if you weigh about 5 lb. – Janus Bahs Jacquet May 20 '15 at 09:06
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    The verb weigh doesn't take an object, but it does take a complement, usually a measure phrase. The noun phrase about ten pounds is the complement of the verb weigh here. The head of this noun phrase is the word pounds. – Araucaria - Him May 20 '15 at 14:25
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    @zeroflagL: No, about modifies the whole measure phrase 5 lbs, not just the number 5. As Edwin points out, this is a quantifier which modifies a measure phrase. It indicates that the measure is approximate, not exact. It's not a preposition in this construction. – John Lawler May 20 '15 at 15:50
  • I agree with @Araucaria that "about 5 lbs" is a complement of the verb "weigh", not a modifier of it. It's an obligatory constituent -- *"He weighs" -- but modifiers are optional. – Greg Lee May 20 '15 at 16:05
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    @GregLee Near-obligatory, at least. “He is, therefore he weighs” (i.e., has mass and is not weightless). – Janus Bahs Jacquet May 20 '15 at 16:30
  • +1. This is good question! :) . . . But be aware that "weigh" is not necessarily intransitive (consider "The suitcase weighs five pounds"); and so, you might not want to start your interesting discussion with that assumption. – F.E. May 20 '15 at 16:44
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    @F.E. Having considered, I am pretty darn sure "The suitcase weighs five pounds" is an intransitive use of weighs. A transitive use would be "This scale weighs objects up to 8 lbs." – Adam May 20 '15 at 17:02
  • Consider this example: "This suitcase weighs exactly that amount" which seems to be somewhat similar to your example (and my example) in general structure and meaning. That example is borrowed from the 2002 CGEL page 1432 [17], and those authors consider their example to have an object. – F.E. May 20 '15 at 17:11
  • In case anyone is interested, on page 1432 in CGEL is: "Because the objects here cannot be externalized by passivization they differ sharply from prototypical objects. The view taken here, however, is that the resistance of the verbs in [17] to passivization does not provide convincing grounds for saying that the post-verbal NPs are not objects: passivization does not provide either a necessary or a sufficient condition for object status (…)." – F.E. May 20 '15 at 17:16
  • @F.E. Erm, but I seem to remember you freaking out when you first read that - giving me the impression that you didn't really agree with CaGEL!? :D – Araucaria - Him May 20 '15 at 18:14
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    @Araucaria Me an old guy, memory out visiting without me. There's a quite a few little comments of mine in the margins of CGEL, and so . . . :D – F.E. May 20 '15 at 18:29

2 Answers2

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In short, yes, about is an adverb here. It means approximately, and is used correctly in both your examples.

EDIT: When I say adverb, I mean it modifies the adjective five, not the verb weigh. In English, adverbs can modify not only verbs, but also adjectives and other adverbs. This Oxford entry confirms that it is an adverb indeed.

Tushar Raj
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    Is it an adverb or adjective? It means approximately. Consider She walked about four miles. It seems to me to be qualifying the noun miles rather than the verb walked. – WS2 May 20 '15 at 07:36
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    @WS2 You wouldn't say "She walked about miles", would you? "About" modifies "four" in this case. – a better oliver May 20 '15 at 08:50
  • @WS2: See edit. – Tushar Raj May 20 '15 at 09:26
  • Isn't a word which modifies an adjective also an adjective. He was wearing a dark red pullover. Dark is an adjective isn't it? – WS2 May 20 '15 at 09:27
  • @WS2: Adverb: A word or phrase that modifies the meaning of an adjective, verb, or other adverb, expressing manner, place, time, or degree (e.g. gently, here, now, very). Oxford – Tushar Raj May 20 '15 at 09:29
  • I think we are getting a bit semantic here. I don't have time right now to consult the OED, but I would call dark an adjective. – WS2 May 20 '15 at 09:32
  • @WS2: Dark is an adjective. But, about is an adverb. These are facts. Why does this contradiction appear in English is a good question. BTW, in my native Hindi, adverbs can't modify adjectives. We have a special term for words that do. – Tushar Raj May 20 '15 at 09:34
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    @WS2 "Dark" is an adjective because it modifies "red pullover" (so effectively pullover). Or it could be part of the expression "dark red". Mind the difference between "a particular hard task" and "a particularly hard task", or "a bare minimum" and "a barely sufficient minimum". Are "hard" and "sufficient" modified by an adverb or an adjective? – a better oliver May 20 '15 at 10:51
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    In English adverbs can modify just about any part of speech apart from co-ordinating conjunctions. Btw, dictionaries are rubbish at parts of speech! – Araucaria - Him May 20 '15 at 14:20
  • @Araucaria: Which side do you come down on, then? Is about an adverb here, or do you disagree? – Tushar Raj May 20 '15 at 14:25
  • @Area51DetectiveFiction I'm on the fence. I think it might be either a preposition or an adverb :) – Araucaria - Him May 20 '15 at 14:26
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    That's one of the fences that the original ELL question has me straddling, @Araucaria. I started on the side of preposition, but now I'm not sure. The other fence I'm on is whether "weighs" is transitive or copular. In other words, is the phrase "about a pound" a direct object or a subject complement? If I can climb off that fence, I might be in a better position to climb off the other. – Gary Botnovcan May 20 '15 at 15:41
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    @GaryBotnovcan I would definitely say subject complement for that one. Weigh in this sense cannot be passivised, so it must be intransitive, and about a pound seems to me to be describing a quality of the subject. If not a subject complement, it is some other kind of loose complement, and assuming that doesn't seem to have any particular advantages to me. – Janus Bahs Jacquet May 20 '15 at 15:53
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    @Araucaria I'm thinking not preposition—if it were a preposition, its object should be detachable, which this isn't. “He went about his business” ==> “The business he went about was…”; but “He weighs about 100 lb.” =!=> “*The 100 lb. he weighs about is/are…”. It would have to be “The about 100 lb. he weighs is/are…” (which is quite clumsy and jarring, but at least makes sense). – Janus Bahs Jacquet May 20 '15 at 15:59
  • "About a pound of it was weighed" -- I'm not completely sure it fails the passive voice test. Then again, it doesn't cleanly pass an obvious test for subject complements, either: "It is a thing about a pound" or "It is an about-a-pound thing". Such a simple sentence, yet the closer I look the confuseder I gets. – Gary Botnovcan May 20 '15 at 16:02
  • On another note, five may be considered a determiner, a quantifier, or something else entirely depending on your theoretical framework—but it is not an adjective. You cannot quantify or compare five the way you can quantify and compare adjectives, and predicative use is highly archaic and dubious at best (or ungrammatical at worst). – Janus Bahs Jacquet May 20 '15 at 16:03
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    @GaryBotnovcan That's a different sense of weigh. When it means ‘to have (a specific amount of) weight’, it is intransitive. When it means ‘to ascertain the gravitational force exerted upon an object by using scales’, then it is transitive. If what he did was to take five pounds and put it on the scales to find out how much the five pounds weigh, that would be passivisable; but I rather fear it would not be physically possible in this dimension/universe. – Janus Bahs Jacquet May 20 '15 at 16:07
  • I can only tell that it's somewhere near the border between the clearly copular "It's weight is about five pounds" and the clearly transitive "It exerts about five pounds of pressure downwards". – Gary Botnovcan May 20 '15 at 16:14
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Weigh in this sense cannot be passivised, so it must be intransitive <-- but isn't passivization a sufficient, not a necessary, test for object-hood? E.g. "His uncle had [two yachts]", it has an object but cannot be passivized. – F.E. May 20 '15 at 16:18
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    @F.E. Can it not? “Two yachts were had by his uncle” is, to me at least, grammatical, if not exactly pretty. “A good time was had by all” is parallel and perfectly commonplace. (Yes, “so it must be” was a bit of an overstatement. The fact that it can't be passivised speaks against it being an object, as does the fact that you can use an adjective or an adverb without changing the meaning in cases like “it weighs heavy/heavily on my heart”.) – Janus Bahs Jacquet May 20 '15 at 16:25
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Supposed not, as “Two yachts were had by his uncle” seems to be considered ungrammatical for today's standard English (w.r.t. 2002 CGEL, pg 246). -- Also, I might have been too general in my previous comment about passivization being a sufficient test for object-hood, for it seems that sufficiency applies only if it is a core-complement NP of an active clause. – F.E. May 20 '15 at 16:34
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Quite if five pounds was the object of the preposition, but the way I'm leaning is that about is a preposition functioning as a modifier of the numeral five in the noun phrase about five pounds. Erm, that's at the moment anyway. I'm not thinking that about five pounds is a preposition phrase with five pounds as a complement ... Don't know if you can see my temporarily-deleted half-written answer post below? (Need to do some homework on this ...) – Araucaria - Him May 20 '15 at 18:19
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    @Gary Botnovcan 'The other fence I'm on is whether "weighs" is transitive or copular. In other words, is the phrase "about a pound" a direct object or a subject complement?' Aarts, one of the foremost analysts of complementation, {Aarts and McMahon} posits that .. – Edwin Ashworth May 20 '15 at 21:44
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    "post-verb noun groups such as appear in 'it weighed a ton'; ... 'the piano seemed an antique' should not be considered objects but are best regarded as belonging to a slightly different category". See the 'Give it me! Write me!' thread. Be aware that 'complement' is used as a generalisation. – Edwin Ashworth May 20 '15 at 21:46
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    @EdwinAshworth But that book there that you linked to (The Handbook of English Linguistics), isn't Bas Aarts and Linda McMahon editors? And that page you linked to, is that a chapter ("Verbs and Their Satellites") authored by D.J. Allerton? . . . Oh, look, there's a chapter in there authored by Huddleston and Pullum too! And so is Birner and Ward! – F.E. May 21 '15 at 00:31
  • @F.E. As Aarts is an editor, I assume he subscribes to Allerton's views; but you're correct: I've corrected my own post there. Allerton is by no means unauthoritative. I personally agree that the 'if it seems to occupy the slot one expects for a DO, it is one' approach is unsatisfactory. – Edwin Ashworth May 21 '15 at 14:03
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    @EdwinAshworth: This is officially the highest ratio of comment section length:answer length I've ever seen – Tushar Raj May 21 '15 at 14:10
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Traditionally, words modifying just about anything other than a noun phrase were lumped into the default category: adverbs.

Here, a more analytical approach is to label about as a quantifier modifier, which is obviously its function (if one is in the 'numbers are quantifiers' camp. Those who define numbers as being different from quantifiers on the grounds of precision will find a difficulty with this.)

Collins certainly recognises numbers used before noun phrases as determiners:

seventy

determiner

...

6. a. amounting to seventy: the seventy varieties of fabric.

Edwin Ashworth
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    Words that modify nouns are adjectives. Adjectives don't modify noun phrases. "He saw a probable UFO"/"He saw probably a UFO". – Greg Lee May 20 '15 at 16:27
  • British Council_Learn English: 'Noun Phrases : Often a noun phrase is just a noun or a pronoun.' Adjectives do modify noun phrases. I didn't claim that they modified all noun phrases. – Edwin Ashworth May 20 '15 at 21:24
  • Often a noun phrase may consist of just a noun or a pronoun, but that doesn't mean it is just a noun or a pronoun. For instance, when an adjective modifies the noun of a noun phrase subject, e.g., "Old hats are tough", even though "Hats are tough" is possible, with a one word subject, the "old" doesn't modify the noun phrase subject, it's inside the noun phrase subject, and within that subject, it modifies the noun "hats". Not the noun phrase. The noun. Adjectives never modify noun phrases. – Greg Lee May 20 '15 at 23:11
  • I'd argue that refreshing in a refreshing cup of coffee is modifying other than the head noun. – Edwin Ashworth May 21 '15 at 13:53
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    yes, I think you're right about "a refreshing cup of coffee". Following McCawley, "refreshing" modifies the N' "cup of coffee", and in turn, that N' consists of the noun "cup" with its complement "of coffee". I usually conflate noun and N' (N-bar) in these discussions, because most people don't know about N', I don't believe in them 100%, and it complicates discussions. But the structure for your example is [NP a [N' refreshing [N' [N cup] of coffee ] ] ]. N' can be replaced by "one", as in "You'd like an old stale cup of coffee, but I'd prefer a refreshing one." – Greg Lee May 21 '15 at 14:57
  • I know that the last example I gave, above, is ambiguous. – Greg Lee May 21 '15 at 15:02