Adjectives as nouns, mainly as attested in [i]Boethius[/i] translations from Old to Modern English and in Modern German

Book excerpt: Adjectives can be used as nouns in English as well as in German. In Modern German, however, they can assume a greater variety of forms than is possible in Modern English, partly as a result of the loss of inflectional endings in English; e.g. Modern German [i]gut – das Gut, das Gute, der Gute, die Gute, die Guten, die Güter[/i] (also [i]die Güte, die Gutheit)[/i] versus Modern English [i]good – the good, the goods[/i] (also [i]goodness).[/i] With regard to this phenomenon, two issues deserve attention: first of all, the historical development of adjectives as nouns in English and, secondly, their linguistic classification. The merit of this study is that it undertakes the first detailed analysis of this phenomenon with the aid of corpus material. The investigation leads to intriguing conclusions that combine several linguistic levels of description, and that break with traditional concepts of rigid word-classes in favor of a theory of degrees of »adjectiviness« and »nouniness«.