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"Bright" is listed in the OED as an adjective. However, in front of a color being used as an adjective, it performs as an adverb since adverbs(not adjectives) modify adjectives.

Ex. "The bright red car..."

In this situation, what part of speech is "bright"?

tchrist
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flob6469
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    If you ditch the 'everything else has to be classed as an adverb' nonsense, this becomes easy: it's a secondary [adjectve-] modifier. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 22 '16 at 20:23
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    *Dark* blue, *bright* yellow are among a small number of words that are adjectives that can be used in a way that makes them look like adverbs. –  Mar 22 '16 at 20:25
  • *Bright, adjective (of colour) strong in ​colour:* Leslie always ​wears bright ​colours. He said ​hello and I ​felt my ​face ​turn bright ​red. a bright ​shade of ​green. http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/bright –  Mar 22 '16 at 20:30
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    "Bright" is an adjective (not an adverb) modifying the noun phrase "red car". It works like this: the head of the noun phrase "car" is modified by "red" to give "red car" and this in turn is modified by "bright" to give "bright red car". It means that "the car is bright by the standards applicable to red ones". – BillJ Mar 22 '16 at 20:36
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    @BillJ, huh? "Bright" modifies the color of the car, not the car itself. The color of the car is bright red as opposed to dark red or dull red. "Bright" does not modify the car, at all. – Kristina Lopez Mar 22 '16 at 21:11
  • @Kristina Lopez I didn't say that "bright" modifies "car". I said that it modifies "red car". There are two layers of modification here, sometimes called 'stacking'. – BillJ Mar 22 '16 at 21:14
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    @BillJ, this is not an example of stacking. Shiny, late-model, red car is stacking because all the modifiers are modifying "car". "Bright red car is describing a car that is bright red in color, not a bright, red car (or a bright car that's red). If that is not what you're meaning, my apologies but that's what I interpreted from what you wrote in your comment. – Kristina Lopez Mar 22 '16 at 21:25
  • @BillJ I assume we have to invent retrievable nouns for 'I prefer deep blue to mid blue'? In spite of CGEL's infallibility, I believe that 'deep' (etc) is more closely connected with 'blue' than anything else. 'Bright' may be indeterminate, but 'matt' looks more like an adjective-modifier than a noun-phrase-modifier. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 22 '16 at 21:26
  • @Josh61 If it looks like an adjective but swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, eats like a duck, has almost identical DNA to most ducks ... it's not an adjective. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 22 '16 at 21:29
  • @Kristina 'Bright' is indeterminate here. It may be modifying 'red' ("If it's bright red it will stand out better than if it's pale pink") or 'car' ("Isn't that red car bright in the sunlight? Not like the dusty white one.") Compare with other premodifiers, where hyphens are used to disambiguate: sweet shop-girl / sweet-shop girl. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 22 '16 at 21:39
  • @Kristina Lopez. I take your version, one distinguished by commas, to be coordination, not stacking, where "car" is modified by a coordination of adjectives, meaning a car that is red, late-model and shiny, i.e. three distinct and separate properties of "car". Edwin's "deep blue" as in, say, "deep blue sky", I'd call 'submodification', modification of a modifier, where "deep" modifies "blue" and "deep blue" in turn modifies "sky". – BillJ Mar 22 '16 at 22:18
  • @BillJ So you know where I'm coming from... the sources I referenced to be sure I was interpreting "stacking" correctly are this http://www.mit.edu/course/21/21.guide/stacked.htm and this http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/stacked-modifiers. To both you and Edwin, I'd have to say that the OP's example may be part of the problem since at least where I come from, we don't call a car "bright", we call it shiny or flashy or striking so bright would seem to be modifying the color red, which is a common modification. – Kristina Lopez Mar 22 '16 at 22:19
  • @BillJ There comes a point where most people agree a strongly cohesive modifier+noun string has become a compound (eg brick red: 'Definition of brick red [noun]: ... a moderate reddish brown' {M-W} (though Wiktionary classifies the premodifier incarnation as a compound adjective). It's the grey areas that cause problems of analysis. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 22 '16 at 23:02
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    The thing is, the color names are nouns and also adjectives. "Bright" modifies "red" as a noun, then the noun is used as an adjective. It's one of those odd things that colors do. (There was a question about this 2-3 months ago, with some relatively extensive answers.) – Hot Licks Mar 22 '16 at 23:44
  • @HotLicks Would you mind commenting a link to the question that you mentioned? – flob6469 Mar 23 '16 at 19:40
  • @flob6469 - I would, if I could find it. The search mechanism here stinks. – Hot Licks Mar 23 '16 at 20:49
  • Relevant question: Is a dark polka dot necktie dark? – herisson Mar 26 '16 at 23:29

1 Answers1

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TL;DR: I would analyze it as an adjective, but it's not a clear-cut case, and I think you can make a decent argument for analyzing it as an adverb.

The parts of speech are somewhat artificial constructs; they are an incredibly useful way to briefly describe the syntactic distributions of words, support the analysis of sentences and of words that they collocate with, and so on, but there are many edge-cases where a word has a distinctive distribution that does not fully conform to the usual patterns. When this happens, we want to find the best analysis — the analysis that accounts for the most observed evidence with the fewest exceptions, complications, and special pleading — but it's not realistic to expect that we'll always arrive at universal agreement about what part of speech a given word "is".

For example, in shone bright, some sources analyze bright as a predicative adjective (see e.g. the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, § 5.2 (c), page 567), whereas others analyze it as a flat adverb (see e.g. https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wc/when-adverbs-fall-flat/).

For bright red, similarly, both analyses exist; CGEL doesn't seem to explicitly address it, but it's easy to find other sources that give this either as an example of the adjective bright (e.g. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/bright) or as an example of a putative flat adverb bright (e.g. http://blog.writeathome.com/index.php/2014/01/the-parts-of-speech-102/).

We can sometimes tell whether something is an adjective or a flat adverb by comparing it with a more typical adjective with a derived -ly adverb, such as beautiful. So, let's try that.

We can easily say that a car has a beautiful red color, by using beautiful with an unambiguous noun:

The car is a beautiful red color.
The car is a beautiful shade of red.
The car is a beautiful red.

but if we try to say the same thing by modifying the adjective red, it doesn't work:

*The car is beautiful red.
[*]The car is beautifully red.

I think we can all agree that the first of these is clearly ungrammatical. The second sentence could be grammatical, but not, I think, with the intended interpretation: it doesn't mean that car's red color is beautiful, but that the car's being red is beautiful, or that the car is red in a beautiful way. (For example, if a car and a person's face are the same shade of red, then either both are a beautiful shade of red, or both are not (though in one case the color's beauty is less likely to be noticed); but it's conceivable that exactly one of them is "beautifully red", for example if we've got some schadenfreude about the person's emotional reaction.)

So, this approach doesn't seem to have worked: bright is neither like beautiful nor like beautifully.

So this may not be a straightforward case where we can point to one analysis as obviously correct. But, we can still try to come up with a good analysis.

Whatever analysis we come up with, we'd want it to be one that works for the many other similar words that are normally adjectives but that can modify color adjectives: light, dark, pale, deep, royal (blue), burnt (orange), dirty (blond) (hair), hot (pink), rusty (orange), yellowish (green), reddish (orange), and so on and so forth. Furthermore, we'd also ideally want it to account for why we don't seem to see any obvious adverbs used this way, and also for why don't say *"the car is beautiful red".

All this being considered, I'd propose something like this:

Color names can be used either as nouns or as adjectives. This applies even to such multi-word color names as bright red and navy blue, which have the internal structures Adj-N and N-N (respectively), but which can nonetheless be used as adjectives, as in "a bright red car" or "a navy blue dress".

where beautiful red doesn't count as a "color name" because the beautiful doesn't serve to identify the shade of red, merely to evaluate it. (Hopefully that's not too much special pleading.) Under this analysis bright is indeed an adjective, because it's modifying the noun red, even when bright red is an adjective rather than a noun.

But you may be able to come up with a better analysis, and perhaps that better analysis will handle it as an adverb.

ruakh
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