Substantivisation of Adjectives

Adjectives display the ability to be easily substantivised by conversion (zero-derivation). Among such adjectives there are units well-established in the system of lexicon (a relative, a dear), and new coinages (a sensitive).

Among the substantivised adjectives there can clearly be distinguished two sets:

1) the set which from the categorial point expresses constitutive categories of the noun (the number, the case, the gender, the article determination) and performs normal nounal functions.

2) the set characterised by hybrid lexico-grammatical features (the poor, the rich).

Such words demonstrate incomplete presentation of the part-of speech characteristics of either nouns or adjectives: 1) like nouns, the words are used in the article form; express the category of number (in a relational way); 2) their article and number forms are rigid as they do not show the regular structural change (categorially unchangeable); 3) the words convey the mixed adjectival-nounal semantics of property.

Such adjectival-nounal words are highly productive and idiomatically characteristic of Modern English (adjectivids). They fall into two main grammatical subgroups: 1) pluralia tantum (the English, the rich, the unemployed, the uninitiated, etc.) expressing sets of people (personal multitudes); 2) singularia tantum (the invisible, the abstract, the tangible, etc.) expressing abstract ideas of various types. The words of the second set are often referred to as partly substantivised.