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My favorite is apple pie.

Is it correct? Can the adjective be a subject in an English sentence?

KillingTime
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Olga
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    Did you look in a dictionary? Why do you think "favorite" is an adjective here? – Laurel Nov 21 '23 at 19:29
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    Hello, Olga. 'Favorite' is not always an adjective. Here, it is the noun incarnation, part of the noun phrase (some would say determiner phrase) 'my favorite'. Check in any dictionary. (Another intercategorial polyseme is the verb, as in 'to favorite an image'.) – Edwin Ashworth Nov 21 '23 at 19:30
  • My favourite [flavour/desert/sweet/pudding/dish] is apple pie – Mari-Lou A Nov 21 '23 at 21:33
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    Voting to reopen because, while the OP's example is bad, the answer to the question is, surprisingly, "yes": consider examples like "Ugly is what I'd call it." – alphabet Nov 21 '23 at 22:08
  • As @Mari-LouA wrote in her comment, this is an example of a common practice in English where a noun is omitted and only its modifier(s) retained. Compare to My oldest* is named Jake. Or even to The rich pay a shockingly small proportion of their income in taxes. In the former, child* has been omitted. And the latter can be viewed as having had people who are omitted. – PaulTanenbaum Nov 21 '23 at 22:24
  • @alphabet: I think "Ugly is what I'd call it" is just a "use/mention" distinction, not really relevant to exploring other "real" syntactic categories and distinctions. – FumbleFingers Nov 21 '23 at 23:50
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    @FumbleFingers A better example: "Angry is how I feel about it." That's not a case of mentioning the word (as in "'Angry' has five letters"); – alphabet Nov 22 '23 at 00:29
  • @EdwinAshworth "intercategorial polyseme"! – BillJ Nov 22 '23 at 08:45
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    The logical analysis is that "favourite" is a fused modifier-head, understood to mean "favourite desert" or some other foodstuff. It's called 'fused' because it combines the functions in the NP of head and modifier. – BillJ Nov 22 '23 at 08:56
  • @Laurel Maybe because it's an adjective? – Araucaria - Him Nov 22 '23 at 13:44
  • @Bill J It's the only term I've come across used for say 'round [v]' as compared with 'round [n]' as compared .... Obviously, homographs are discounted. – Edwin Ashworth Nov 22 '23 at 14:28
  • @EdwinAshworth I would say that 'homonymy' covers "favourite" in your example. But it matters not, since the OP's "favourite" is best analysed as a fused modifier-head NP., where it retains its status as an adjective, whilst being head of the matrix NP "my favourite", Btw, not sure why you mentioned the term 'determiner phrase' in your very first comment. "Favourite" can only be a modifier. – BillJ Nov 22 '23 at 15:23
  • Related? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. – tchrist Nov 23 '23 at 02:59

2 Answers2

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In "My favorite is apple pie," the word favorite is, on what I think is the most likely interpretation, just a noun. But more generally, yes, a sentence can have an adjective as its subject. (Note that in the below I'm following the terminology of Huddleston & Pullum (2002).)

First, an adjective phrase can serve as the subject of the so-called "specifying be," where the subject expresses the value of a variable, as in sentences like "Ugly is what I'd call it" or "Angry is how I felt" (Huddleston & Pullum (2002), p. 268, 1422). In those sentences, ugly and angry are adjective phrases (consisting of single adjectives), each acting as the subject of to be.

The second case occurs when a sentence's subject is a noun phrase, but where that noun phrase is headed, not by a noun, but by an adjective serving as a "fused modifier-head" (ibid., p. 416-418). These occur in sentences like "There are many skyscrapers in the world, but the tallest stands in Dubai," where tallest is an adjective but it acts as the head of the noun phrase the tallest, which in turn is the subject of stands.

One might think that a sentence like "Even better was her third novel" also contains an adjective acting as a subject, but that is not so (ibid., p. 268). You can see this from the fact that the verb agrees with novel; if we make it plural, the verb becomes plural also: "Even better were her later novels." This is also obvious from the fact that the sentence can't undergo subject-auxiliary inversion with that word order intact: * "Was even better her third novel?" is ungrammatical. Instead, such sentences are examples of subject-dependent inversion, similar to sentences like "On the manager's desk sat a large manila envelope" (ibid., p. 1385-1389).

alphabet
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    How do you know that it's the noun favourite and not a fused modifier-head adjective? My very favourite is apple pie or My most favourite is the green both seem to have modifiers that can't normally modify nouns. There's no way of telling whether it's a noun or an adjective in OP's example. [I agree with BJ about ibid - it's banned in most academic journals!] – Araucaria - Him Nov 22 '23 at 13:42
  • @Araucaria-Him My reason for considering it a noun is that it can be pluralized; there are plenty of attested examples for "My very favorites are..." and indeed that sounds acceptable to me. – alphabet Nov 22 '23 at 14:15
  • Is there an example on p268 with '[adjective] is [what/how-clause]'? – Edwin Ashworth Nov 22 '23 at 14:20
  • H&P have an subcategory of fused modifier-heads with "special interpretations", such as the French and the rich. (Some dictionaries label rich as in the rich as a noun.) If a magician says "Ladies and Gentlemen, the utterly impossible is child's play for me, as I will now demonstrate," the audience may have to wait to learn what impossible refers to (unless, perhaps, his lovely assistant is lying down and he has a saw in hand.) Perhaps this is as close as we come to a noun function for an adjective. – DjinTonic Nov 22 '23 at 15:23
  • @alphabet Maybe you missed the bit where I said you can't tell which it is in OP's example. Of course there are examples where you can tell which it is. For example in "My favourite are ..." it must be an adjective and if pluralised must be a noun. You can't tell in OP's example! – Araucaria - Him Nov 22 '23 at 16:25
  • @Araucaria-Him I find the "My favorite are..." example quite unlikely, but certainly the sentence doesn't exclude an interpretation on which it's an example of subject-dependent inversion. I've added the qualifier "on what I think is the most likely interpretation" to my answer, though. – alphabet Nov 22 '23 at 16:29
  • @EdwinAshworth I've added a citation of p. 1422 which includes more relevant examples. – alphabet Nov 22 '23 at 16:29
  • There is the obvious objection here which is avoiding repetition; repetition like this: My favorite pie is apple pie. Where the first pie is implied. These people always seem to get their knickers in a twist. "There are many skyscrapers in the world, but the tallest [skyscraper] stands in Dubai," Sometimes I think they don't get how English really works... – Lambie Nov 22 '23 at 17:18
  • Thanks, but doesn't H & P restrict the terminology to 'foregrounded element' (rather than subject) for 'Insensitive is how I'm inclined to describe him'? – Edwin Ashworth Nov 22 '23 at 19:09
  • @EdwinAshworth pp. 268-269 explain this; with the specifying be we can reverse which element is subject and which is predicative complement. – alphabet Nov 22 '23 at 19:40
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    I can understand this when the complement is a nominal (though 'Our John is a poet' ↔ 'A poet is our John' seems like a mere poetic reordering to C - copula - S whereas 'Our John is a suitable candidate' and 'A suitable candidate is our John' seem to differ semantically. But to identify 'angry' as the subject in 'Angry is how I'd describe him', being a virtual rewrite of 'I'd describe him as angry', really exercises my support for the 'it's the grammar that dictates this'. Do we call 'He led them a merry dance' ditransitive because it looks like it is? – Edwin Ashworth Nov 22 '23 at 22:49
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Nominal ellipsis.

As in:

McCarthy (1991:43) supposes that ellipsis is the omission of elements normally required by the grammar which is the speaker/writer assumes are obvious from the context and therefore need not be raised. This is not to say that every utterance which is not fully explicit is elliptical; most messages require some inputs from the context to make sense of them. Ellipsis is distinguished by the structure having some "missing" elements, for example, when there is a written sentence: Nellly [sic: typo?] liked the green tiles, I preferred the blue. For this type of the sentence, it is as nominal ellipsis because the word involves omission of noun headword.

See the full explanation for types of ellipsis here: ellipsis

Sample sentence: My favorite is apple pie.

Ellipsis: My favorite [pie] is apple pie.

Lambie
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