Keep + Adjectives
Hello all,
I have ESL students doing a writing exercise wherein they must replicate various sentence structures by subbing in their own words. One sentence is "She kept silent." However, its opposite, "She kept noisy", sounds distinctly off to me. I cannot think of a reason why some adjectives seem to OK to use after "keep", but others do not.
E.g. "kept busy", or "kept fresh", but not "kept blue", or "kept asleep". Instead we would use "stayed".
Is there a rule I'm unaware of that dictates which adjectives are acceptable, or are some grammatical but just awkward because we don't typically phrase them that way? Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Top answer
gcorkery Is there a rule I'm unaware of If there is a rule, it's probably not worth the trouble to work out what it is. In general, however, it seems to me that for the relatively few adjectives that are regularly used with 'keep' (less than 50 I'd guess), the trend is to use only those adjectives that represent a state that is the opposite of the state which will come about naturally if nothing is done to prevent it. Some of the following may ring true; others maybe not so much.
- gcorkery Is there a rule I'm unaware of If there is a rule, it's probably not worth the trouble to work out what it is.
- In general, however, it seems to me that for the relatively few adjectives that are regularly used with 'keep' (less than 50 I'd guess), the trend is to use only those adjectives that represent a state that is the opposite of the state which will come about naturally if nothing is done to prevent it.
- Some of the following may ring true; others maybe not so much.
- keep fresh — if you do nothing to prevent it, it will become stale or rotten keep silent/quiet — if you do nothing to prevent it, people will naturally talk keep afloat — ...
- or else you drown keep clean — ...
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gcorkeryIs there a rule I'm unaware of
If there is a rule, it's probably not worth the trouble to work out what it is. In general, however, it seems to me that for the relatively few adjectives that are regularly used with 'keep' (less than 50 I'd guess), the trend is to use only those adjectives that represent a state that is the opposite of the state whi
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