skipped?

'Three of the bombers have also been comfirmed dead.'

It's a common expression just like, "the victims were rushed to hospital but were pronounced dead on arrival.

The lexical definition of "confirm" is as follows.

1. 
   
   confirm, corroborate, sustain, substantiate, support, affirm -- (establish or strengthen as with new evidence or facts; "his story confirmed my doubts"; "The evidence supports the defendant")
   
   
2. 
   
   confirm, reassert -- (strengthen or make more firm; "The witnesses confirmed the victim's account")
   

Paco,

My Merriam-Webster has 'confirmed' as an adjective.

Hello Davkett

I know "confirmed" itself can be used as an adjective. What I am saying is that I cannot find any lexical description that confirms that an adjective can follow the object of the verb "confirm".

paco

'Three of the bombers have also been confirmed dead.'

Paco, I ask your indulgence for a moment. In the quoted sentence, can we not read the term 'confirmed dead' as an adjective?

Like: three of the confirmed dead bombers.

The adjective "confirmed" is normally used as an attributive adjective (that is, an adjective that comes before a noun). We might say "the confirmed dead", where "confirmed" can be interpreted as an attributive adjective modifying the collective noun "the dead". But I am not sure whether "the confirmed dead bombers" is a right English phrase. It sounds to me as if "confirmed" behaves like an adver

I wonder whether we can take 'dead' in this example as a subject complement (predicate adjective).

MrP

I confess that I can't keep up with you advanced teachers on grammatical terminology, but why couldn't 'confirmed dead' be equivalent syntactically to 'stone dead'.

Hi guys,

I'm late to this discussion but I don't see what the real difficulty is.

We can say

'She has been considered beautiful (by all who know her)'

We can say

'She has been confirmed dead (by a doctor)'

Surely it's just a passive form with 'to be dead', where 'to be' is omitted.

Sorry if I'm missing the point at issue.

Cl

Hi Davkett

I don't like you to get fed up with technical terms. But the "stone" in "stone dead" is a relic of Old English's noun usage called "adverbial accusative". You have a lot of similar phrases. "Her skin is snow white", "The stars are diamond bright", "It was pitch dark inside the room", etc.

paco