Adjectives that do not have predicative position
I've read somewhere that some adjectives cannot be used in the predicative position; for example "this is a major problem" is acceptable, but "the problem is major" is not acceptable.
I'm wondering what other adjectives cannot be used in predicative position other than major. Is it the only one we have in English?
There are many kinds of non-predicative adjectives. A few examples:
- former president
- electrical engineer
- alleged criminal
- main reason
http://eecoppock.info/CoppockSemFest09.pdf shows you many kinds of examples. It is a good reference even if you choose to not read the technical bits.
It is claimed that many adjectives cannot be used in a predicative position. Commonly, entire, utter, former, and potential are claimed to be of this type. Attributively, they look like this:
- The entire class helped.
- There was utter devastation.
- He's a potential client.
- He's a former client.
Personally, I have no problem using most these words in the predicative position. I'm a native English speaker, and they all seem fine to me. However, many English speakers have problems with:
- I toured the areas affected by the hurricane. The devastation was utter.
- He's so unlikely to spend any money, of all our possible future clients, I consider him the most potential.
To me at least, "the problem was major" is perfectly fine. If you asked me how anyone could find a problem with it, it likely wouldn't even occur to me that major is claimed to not be usable predicatively. But even I can't find any way to use entire predicatively.
I don't have the reputation to comment, but along the lines of Peter Shor's 'entire function' example, there are people who insist on saying 'the space has the Hausdorff property' rather than that 'the space is Hausdorff' should saying 'Hausdorff space' not suffice. I think the majority are happy with 'is Hausdorff', though.