Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The xkcd, Language Nerd, for the 5th:

A little festival of part-of-speech conversion, with adverbing, verbing, and adjectiving. The verbs to adverb, to verb, and to adjective are, of course, themselves all verbings of nouns.

(The mouseover text introduces still another grammatical topic: “Not to go all sentence fragment on you…”)

Then there’s the construction in go (all) X (on s.o.), where X is a nominal — here, a N + N compound (language nerd, sentence fragment) — converted to an adverbial in construction with the verb go.

There I am, going (all) linguist (on you).

This entry was posted on November 6, 2014 at 6:23 am and is filed under Conversion, Linguistics in the comics, Verbing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.