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Recently, someone objected to my use of the terms "melted ice" and "condensed steam," saying that those materials are no longer ice and steam, respectively. I agreed and said that the corresponding meanings are obviously "ice that has melted" and "steam that has condensed," i.e., liquid water for both. They maintained that the terms are meaningless. They appear thousands of times in the engineering and scientific literature, so they clearly have meaning to practitioners.

This made me wonder whether such adjectives are distinguished; e.g., "dirty ice" is ice that is dirty, but "melted ice," if it is indeed a meaningful term, isn't ice. Is "melted" then a specific type of modifier?

I searched Google Scholar for a while with a variety of terms but couldn't find this concept in the linguistics literature.

Chemomechanics
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    'Melted ice' conveys information that 'water' does not: the previous state of the material. If that's not pertinent in the cited case then it's redundant, but it's never meaningless. – Jim Mack Aug 01 '20 at 18:34
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    A fake diamond is not a diamond. A former president is not a president. When adjectives are used in such a way that they cannot be used predicatively (condensed steam is ex-steam where the steam condensed, not 'steam that is condensed' (ignoring the be-perfect) they are labelled non-semantically-predicative. But note that a fake diamond is not an ex-diamond. // _When adjective + noun pairs cannot be analysed as 'both A and N', eg a 'good forger' is not 'good' and a 'heavy smoker' need not be 'heavy', this is known as non-intersectiveness. – Edwin Ashworth Aug 01 '20 at 18:36
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    The above is covered at term for things like 'naughty step' where the step is not what is naughty; a non-duplicate would have to be more specific. Intersectiveness, and non-semantically-predicative adjectives, have already been covered. The distinguishing factor here is 'adjectives that demand a transformation from a prior state': 'melted', 'condensed', 'former', but not 'fake', 'heavy' as in 'heavy smoker', 'proud' as in 'proud ... – Edwin Ashworth Aug 01 '20 at 18:44
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    day' (these latter transferred epithets). – Edwin Ashworth Aug 01 '20 at 18:46
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    Adjectives don't have tenses, so looking for past-tense adjectives will not find much useful. The kind of adjective you're looking for is formed from a verb, but it's formed from its participle form, not its past tense form. There are two kinds of participles - one ends in -ing, and the other ends in -ed if it's regular like melted, or something else if it's not, like worn or sung or broken. You can't always tell whether they're still verbs or whether they're real adjectives; if it can take the (the melted ice) it's an adjective. – John Lawler Aug 01 '20 at 20:05
  • There are differences between "water", "melted ice" and "condensed steam" even though they are all liquid water. Freshly melted ice will be very cold, freshly condensed steam may be very hot and will certainly be very pure if it has not been contaminated. These characteristics may well be significant in the context of the writing. Also the immediate origin of the water may also matter. – BoldBen Aug 01 '20 at 23:11

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