Nominalized adjective

Other adjectives commonly used in this way include rich, wealthy, homeless, disabled, blind, deaf, etc., as well as certain demonyms such as English, Welsh, Irish, French, Dutch.

However, the use of the adjective alone is fairly common in the case of superlatives such as biggest, ordinal numbers such as first, second, etc., and other related words such as next and last.

Many adjectives, though, have undergone conversion so that they can be used regularly as countable nouns; examples include Catholic, Protestant, red (with various meanings), green, etc.

The following table shows the frequency of such uses in different stages of the language:[1] The decline in the use of adjectives as nouns may be attributed to the loss of adjectival inflection throughout Middle English.

In line with the Minimalist Framework elaborated by Noam Chomsky,[2] it is suggested that inflected adjectives are more likely to be nominalized because they have overtly-marked φ-features (such as grammatical number and gender), which makes them suitable for use as the complement of a determiner.

In most other languages, there is no comparable prop-word, and nominalized adjectives, which in many cases retain inflectional endings, have remained more common.

Adjectives in German change their form for various features, such as case and gender, and so agree with the noun that they modify.

[3] Like in English, adjectival nouns are used as a plural definite ("the unemployed") and with nationality words ("the Swedish").

The process functions as a critical means of addition to the open class category of nouns.

When the adjective is nominalized, the adjectival inflection alone expresses case, number and gender, and the noun is omitted.