Although she forgot to water it for a week, the plant was still alive/live.
Which one is right?
My professor has just told me that you must use ALIVE. But I don't know why yet.
Learn English – Would you help me with adjectives, alive and live
adjectivesgrammarvocabulary
Best Answer
For OP's specific context, alive and live are effectively synonyms (meaning living, not dead). The main difference is that, as OED points out, alive occurs chiefly in predicative use (after a verb)...
...as opposed to adjectival live, used attributively (before a noun) in the semantically equivalent...
Note that this distinction only applies in contexts where the living sense is both literal and specifically focusses on gross physical attributes, such as the ability to act/move autonomously. Thus, for example,...
...are both relatively "standard" usages. Attributive use of alive is uncommon, so no-one is likely to say "This is alive yoghurt" in any context. But if we consider these two alternatives...
...most people would interpret #1 the same as the yoghurt examples (i.e. - the micro-organisms which made the cheese in the first place are still living within it). But #2 would probably be interpreted as a facetious allusion to a very mature, runny Camembert, slithering around the plate like a living thing. Or perhaps a truly disgusting cheese as per the more "figurative" usage...
...where alive implies visibly moving in and on it (also crawling with maggots), again with the "whole living organism" sense.
Where the sense is even more figurative (live = real-time, not recorded, for example), live is normally used in both contexts...
TL;DR: OP's teacher is quite correct - native speakers would normally say is alive when they literally mean has not [yet] died, because it's an "attributive" usage.