Learn English – “This is an interesting-looking book.”

adjectivesadverbsmodifiers

"This is an interesting-looking book."

The point of the hyphen is to make 'looking' relate to 'interesting' and not directly to 'book'. 'Looking' modifies 'interesting'…or is it the other way around? Is 'looking' considered an adverb, or is 'interesting-looking' considered one word and one POS? 'Looking' would normally be a participle, which would make it an adjective. Can an adjective modify another adjective?

Oh, and calling it a 'compound adjective' is really just a way of ducking the issue. The point is that 'interesting book' is different from 'interesting-looking book', so 'looking' has modified (in the most literal sense) 'interesting'.

Another point is that 'looking' can't be used as an adjective on its own–'a looking book'…errr…except I just thought of 'looking glass', so scratch that.

Best Answer

A compound noun is a noun (though it might consist of two orthographic words); some modern dictionaries have adopted the practice of labelling even open compounds 'noun':

school bus n.

A publicly or privately owned vehicle

{AHDEL}

They treat other compounds similarly:

bottle green n. A dark to moderate or grayish green.

bottle-green adj.

{AHDEL}

In the thread Compounds and Phrases - differences, John Lawler (1) contrasts compounds with phrases, and (2) states that compounds are treated as if they were unitary:

Phrases belong to syntax. But phrases can be frozen, and those are dealt with as if they were single words.

Point (1) invites the question 'Where does the divide come?'; this has been the subject of various papers and is still disputed.

JL reinforces point (2) in the Labelling of noun components of a verb thread:

[S]cuba certainly refers to a noun, but it's been locked into the compound [in scuba diving] and isn't really functioning as a noun syntactically.

The sense in using this approach is endorsed by the fact that compounds with different variants (eg particle board / particle-board / particleboard; ink well / ink-well / inkwell) (but contrast blackbird / black bird) are really merely spelling variations.

JL does add that it is reasonable on the other hand to trace the etymology of compounds:

If you wanted to class these compound verbs [etc] as having nominal [etc] sources, that would be reasonable.

So 'interesting-looking', a compound premodifier and compound adjective, is an adjective. Classing 'interesting' as a (participial) adjective and 'looking' as a more 'verby' ing-form, we can see where the word originated.

The BBC World Service website has a good overview of the parts of speech that can be seen to have combined to form compound adjectives. But adjective plus adjective is also a possibility, as in 'blue-green'.

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