Women play great tennis.

Question

Women play great tennis.Hi allI wonder what kind of construction is this? And how would we use it?Thank youPBF

CalifJim · Accepted Answer

What kind of construction? I don't think I understand the question.

My first thought is, it's a sentence! That's what kind of construction it is!
What about that sentence is bothering you?

Women play great tennis is like Women are great at playing tennis.
Is that what you wanted to know?
CJ

Peaceblinkfriend · Answer

Thanks for your reply CalifJim.

I don't come across sentences like this ( verb + adjective + noun ) very often so I just thought that this might be a special type of construction.

Like you suggested, I am a lot more familiar with 'women are great at playing tennis' than 'women play great tennis'.

PBF

CalifJim · Answer

Peaceblinkfriendverb + adjective + noun

I'm surprised you haven't seen these combinations more often.
I bought new furniture for the living room.
The kids ate fast food for lunch.
We noticed fresh snow on the ground this morning.
The students studied Greek poetry that semester.
Drivers experienced horrible traffic on the way home this evening.
We heard beautiful music at the concert last night.
The runners splashed cool water on their faces.
Kathy put powdered sugar on the donuts.

CJ

Peaceblinkfriend · Answer

Thanks for your follow-up, CalifJim.

I wasn't expressing myself clearly in that last post. What I meant was that when I first saw the sentence 'women play great tennis', I was bemused by the adjective 'great' because the grammatical side of me, so to speak, registered that the tennis the women play are 'great', much like the way 'red' gives meaning to 'apples' in 'he loves red apples'. So from one particular point of view, I treated 'great' as something which 'belongs' to tennis much like the adjective 'red' belongs to the apples. Of course, logically, 'tennis' is only 'great' because women are good at playing the sport. In other words, it is not very often that I come across uses of adjectives which require this way of thinking, that is, the way we describe something not due to its nature, rather the way we come across it.

Hope what I said make sense.

PBF

AlpheccaStars · Answer

Of course you are right, great is an adjective in your sentence, like the red in red apples.
Homer was a great poet. Some think he was the greatest Greek poet.
Brad Pitt is a not a great actor, nontheless he is very popular.
Winston Churchill was a great prime minister, but not so great an artist.

CalifJim · Answer

Peaceblinkfriendit is not very often that I come across uses of adjectives which require this way of thinking

Yes, now I see what you mean. That makes sense. I think examples of this sort of thing are few and far between. I'll try to rack my brain for more examples -- one of these days! But don't hold your breath!

CJ
Edit:
How about ...?
McDonald's sells fast food.
Does that qualify as the sort of thing you were referring to?
CJ

Clive · Answer

Hi,
How about 'I had a clever idea'? This, too, seems to relate to how we 'come across' something. In other words, all such adjectives are subjective, are they not?

How about 'I saw a small tree'?

If you want to get a bit more philosophical about it, isn't 'a red apple' the same thing? Dogs, for example, don't see red, I think. So, does a dog ever come across 'a red apple'?

Best wishes, Clive

Peaceblinkfriend · Answer

Thank your for all your follow-ups.

I think I have come up with a pretty easy way of distinguishing the 'great tennis' type of adjective use from the usual 'red apple' ones, that is, if I don't get too philosophical about them.

Using CalifJim's example: 'MacDonald's sells fast food'. Although it is pretty close to what I meant by the 'great tennis' type of adjective use, 'fast food' does not qualify as the sort of adjective use I was referring to because, firstly, the way I think about 'fast food' is that it is something we have come to understand as a particular type of food prepared beforehand and served very quickly in a restaurant and, secondly, these type of food cannot be changed by us in the sense that we cannot covert them into 'slow food' just because we choose to slowly indulge them the way we would with roast lamb. The nature of fast food is that it is quick to cook and fast to serve.

To put in a way that allows for comparison, 'fast food' is a thing whose nature is not bound by the way we encounter them.

Now if we consider 'women play great tennis', 'tennis' on its own is a type of sport and that we don't play 'great tennis' as if the sport is called 'great tennis'. Therefore 'tennis' is only 'great' when we have played it for a while and become good at it. So, we effectively change the nature of the sport 'tennis' by way of being good at it. Likewise, we can, theoretically, change 'great tennis' into 'average tennis' if we don't consider ourselves to be great at it, yet this is not the case with 'fast food'.

Consequently, 'tennis' is a thing whose nature can be altered by the way we encounter them into, for instance, 'great tennis'. 'Great tennis' is therefore, in this vantage point, not a thing in the way 'fast food' is.

So thinking of them this way, 'clever idea' and 'small tree' both belong to the 'red apple' group since both 'cleverness' and 'smallness' belong to 'idea' and 'tree' respectively.

The cleverness of an idea cannot be stripped away from it because this is how the idea is designed or constructed, in other words, is the way it is made. Similarly, a tree is small if in comparison it is smaller than most other trees. The smallness is part of the tree's nature the same way the colour red is part of the apple's nature.

I hope what I said makes sense. I know it's quite confusing because even I am not a hundred percent sure what it is that made me uncomfortable with 'women play great tennis'. I suppose the more I come across this type of adjective use the more comfortable and confident I will be when dealing with them.

PBF

Zzap · Answer

CalifJimThe kids ate fast food for lunch.

Is this an example? I don't know if "fast" is an adjective in this sentence, because isn't it "fastfood" as a noun?

Clive · Answer

Hi,

So thinking of them this way, 'clever idea' and 'small tree' both belong to the 'red apple' group since both 'cleverness' and 'smallness' belong to 'idea' and 'tree' respectively.

The cleverness of an idea cannot be stripped away from it because this is how the idea is designed or constructed, in other words, is the way it is made. Similarly, a tree is small if in comparison it is smaller than most other trees. The smallness is part of the tree's nature the same way the colour red is part of the apple's nature.

I don't agree. If you put a 20-metre tree among a group of 50-metre trees, it will seem small. if you put a 20-metre tree among a group of 5-metre trees, it will seem big. It's simply a question of how the viewer perceives it.
Similarly , one person may think an idea is clever and another may think it is not, just as one person may think that women play great tennis and another person may think they don't.

Best wishes, Clive

Women play great tennis.

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