I recently had a conversation about the Spanish word "ahora", in which my conversant claimed that "ahora" is always an adverb, and never a noun.
This lead me to investigate the part of speech of similar words, both in Spanish and English (my native language). According to dictionary.com, "now" can be a noun, as in:
noun
10.
the present time or moment:
"Up to now no one has volunteered."
What makes "now" a noun in this context? In the Spanish equivalent of the example ("Hasta ahora…"), "ahora" is considered an adverb by the dictionaries I checked with.
The gist of the question: How can I know when now (or any word, for that matter–especially one which is commonly an adverb) is a noun? What test can be applied?
In the example quoted above ("Up to now…") it is not at all obvious to me why 'now' should be a noun while with, say "Until tomorrow", 'tomorrow' is an adverb. They seem like the same grammatical construct to me, so I would (apparently quite naively) expect the same part of speech to follow "Up to" or "Until."
Best Answer
tl;dr:
Certain kinds of words and phrases can in English function equally well as nouns as they can adverbs. Whether you prefer to call them nouns acting like adverbs or adverbs acting like nouns is a matter of religion only, since they are still doing the same job no matter what you call them.
The job they are doing is a deictic one, described at the end of this post.
“Now, now!”
Please do not be surprised that “dictionary.com” — or any other dictionary, for that matter — should have gotten this wrong. Grammar is not a dictionary’s strong point to begin with; it is a lexicon, not a grammar. But many dictionaries are still trapped in the fourth century when it comes to parts of speech, and modern syntactic analysis is not.
I would take especial care in crowd-sourced or unattributed “dictionaries”. This includes things like Wikipedia and Wiktionary, and it especially includes any reference as hip and now as Urban Dictionary.
Both nouns and adverbs can be drafted into doing the other one’s normal job. For example, when you say you did something last week, you are using the noun phrase last week adverbially. That doesn’t make week an adverb, though. Furthermore, this is as true in Spanish as it is in English: Lo hice la semana pasada does the very same thing. In both languages, it’s a simple adverbial phrase that happens to be noun phrase as well.
For your purposes, you want to see whether the noun–adverb swap can work the other way, too, particularly for the word now. And the answer is that it can.
To prove that now can act as a noun in English is most easily accomplished by showing it inflected into the plural or by using it as the subject of a verb, preferably as the head noun of a longer noun phrase with traditional prenominal adornments like determiners and adjectives prefacing it.
All these things are easily done.
Furthermore, to show that this is an age-old practice in English and not some flash-in-the-pan phenom pulled out of the Urban Dictionary’s backside, I shall begin in literature of the now-distant past.
In act 2 scene 2 of Timon of Athens, probably written around 1605, Shakespeare wrote:
That has now serving as the subject of be, or so it appears. Some might try to argue that use in a copula may not be good enough evidence, and for those, not even this more famous citation from the start of Richard III (probably written around 1592) suffices:
I think those are enough, but some disagree, claiming that it is fine to have adverbs to either side of a copula:
I disagree. After all, winter is obviously no adverb in Now is the winter, and neither is now. But I do not wish to argue this with them, having yet stronger evidence to present.
Skipping forward a century, in 1711’s The Works of the Right Reverend, Learned and Pious, Thomas Ken: Preparatives for Death we find these half-dozen examples:
All but the sixth are clearly nouns: they have determiners in front of them like this, the, and my; and they are thrice inflected into the plural nows. Only nouns can do those things, and so that these must here be nouns no question can remain.
Jumping ahead one more century to 1820, Sir Walter Scott wrote in The Monastery:
The OED considers that a substantive (that is, noun) use of now.
As a constituent, this very now is clearly acting adverbially to describe when something must be done. But when you look inside that constituent, you clearly find a noun phrase. We do not use this on anything but a noun, and very is there an adjective, not an adverb. We do not apply adjectives to adverbs, but to substantives. Therefore this now can be nothing other than a noun.
If you removed the two front words from the adverbial noun phrase this very now in the Scott citation and produced therefore this compressed version:
If now must be a noun in this very now, even when used adverbially, mustn’t now also be noun when stripped of the pieces we used to prove it a noun, the this and the very?
The sticky bit
We now come to the primary sticking point for most people: they don’t think that when now is used as a prepositional complement it has to be an noun. They think it might still be an adverb. Returning to the Ken citation given above, the final example is one of those places where some will argue that now has to be an adverb.
That sixth example is Of Now I seldom had a thought, or in more conventional ordering, I seldom had a thought of Now. I maintain that this must also be a noun, even if for no other reason that the previous five examples given immediately before it are so clearly nouns, that then so too must it also be a noun.
Those who dispute this position believe that that a prepositional phrase need not inevitably supply a nominal complement to the preposition.
I am discontent with calling any of those complements “adverbs”. The clause examples are larger constituents, but do please that the last example of finished does not actually have a past participle serving as the prepositional complement. This is actually a reduced clause for something like until it is finished or until you are finished, with the obvious elision of something that in any larger context would be so obvious as to allow for its omission.
I really believe that all those prepositional objects are acting as nouns, one way or the other. I do not believe we can just stick any old adverb in there and have things work. These are all ungrammatical:
Nonetheless, some adverbs clearly do work fine there:
At which point one might reasonably ask how there can be any difference between until now and until recently.
The answer, I believe, is that there is not one. But that does not mean those are adverbs there. I think it is better to analyse those not as adverbs but as adverbs acting as nouns.
I’m afraid that the eight sacred parts of speech enumerated by Donatius back in the fourth century are not sufficient for modern syntactic analysis. However, many dictionaries refuse to step away from them, and that is why you find such things in them. They do not admit the notion that what is sometimes an adverb may at other times be a noun.
Thus spake Oxford
The OED, however, is not one of those. It points out many places that now can be a noun (or a substantive — un sustantivo, como quieras). My citations given above were all originally from the OED’s noun examples, although I gave them a fuller treatment than it did.
The OED attests now used as an adverb, as a conjunction, as a noun, and as an adjective.1 The adverbial and conjunctive uses are in sections I an II of that entry, the substantive uses in section III, and the attributive and adjectival uses are in section IV.
1. All four of which have I used at least once is this posting. :)
Interestingly, the uses with a preposition are not in section I; they are in section III with the other noun uses. I therefore present section III for your contemplation:
I am unconvinced that the OED believes that the uses with prepositions count as adverbs; after all, why then did it group sense 13 with the substantive uses of senses 14 and 15? But in any event, now is quite clearly able to function as a noun, as primary sense 14 and 15 prove.
¿Y en castellano?
Now that that’s out of the way, I must note that even El Diccionario de la Real Academia Española hedges its bets on ahora, calling it in places a “locative adverb” rather than merely an adverb. It includes this example:
There it means for now, as in “For now, his health is holding.” There it specifically calls ahora not an adverb but a locative adverb — whatever that means. Apparently it is something that can function as the object of a preposition.
The RAE does actually provide the example of Hasta ahora, but there it just calls the whole thing an expresión usada — a set phrase, and does not attempt further deconstruction.
Spanish is considerably less flexible about parts of speech than is English. You must work rather hard to find instances of plural inflections of words like ahora or ayer — although these can be found if you look hard enough:
So sometimes these words do get nouned even in Spanish, or else you couldn’t find them in the plural. (I’ve left out algunas mañanas, since that can mean some mornings not just some tomorrows. I’ve also left out algunos hoyes for some todays because I believe all examples I found on the internet to be catachrestic for algunos días, which as a phrase is wholly unremarkable.)
The imputed gender for ahora is clearly derived from la hora, but as you see, people aren’t sure what gender to assign ayer when they convert it into noun, since nouns ending in ‑r can come in either flavor. So both algunos and algunas can be found prefixing the now-plural noun ayeres in the wild. Barely.
Fortunately for English, we have no possibility of such confusion of gender with all our yesterdays — nor with our tomorrows for that matter, as Lady Macbeth famously proves when she uses each not just as nouns but indeed even as subjects of verbs:
On Deixis
Words like here, home, and now — words that seem to be both nouns and adverbs — really are in a special category of their very own. They quite comfortably serve multiple possible “duties” in English sentences, sometimes acting more like a noun, at other times acting more like an adverb, and frequently acting like both.
If you want to further research the literature for this particular sort of dual-lived words and phrases and what they are doing, you should know that they are called deictics, and what they’re doing is called deixis.
Amongst other things, deictics can include both locative (place) and temporal (time) deictics. Locative deictics are “place-words” that answer where-questions and include here, there, and yonder. Temporal deictics are “place-words” that answer when-questions, such as today, tomorrow, yesterday, and now, as well as longer phrases like last year and the week after next.