"A dancing lady." In this sentence, is "dancing" an adjective or a verb?

A dancing lady.

In this sentence, Is dancing an adjective or a verb?

Solution 1:

Hold on, this isn't a sentence, because it is missing a subject + verb configuration. If you wanted to say:

"The dancing lady looks nice tonight"

"dancing" here is modifying the subject "lady", and the verb would be "looks".

But without a subject and a verb, your supposed sentence is not a sentence. You would need to say "A lady is dancing", which would make the "lady" the subject, and "is dancing" the verb.

Solution 2:

A dancing lady.

In this noun phrase, "dancing" is a verb phrase.

"Dancing" does not qualify as an adjective. If we compare it to the genuine participial adjective "entertaining" the reasons becomes clear.

"Dancing" can't be modified by "very". We can't say *a very dancing child, but we can say a very entertaining clown.

"Dancing" can't occur as complement to complex-intransitive verbs like "become" or "seem". We can't say *She became/seemed quite dancing, but we can say She became/seemed quite entertaining.

"Dancing" can't occur as complement to complex-transitive verbs like "find". We can't say *I found her quite dancing, but we can say I found her quite entertaining.

The range of expressions that can occur as pre-head modifier to a noun is very large and varied: we don't want to call them all adjectives.

"Entertaining" has the properties of indisputable adjectives and hence must belong in that class, but "dancing" doesn't have those properties and hence is a verb phrase in your example.