Talk:alone

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alone

Etymology questionable. Usage note on pronunciation seems encyclopedic. Adverb section seems wrong in part. DCDuring TALK 23:57, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Etymology section changed. Nadando 00:02, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Half of adverb section in RfD. Will hide verbose pronunciation note somewhow. DCDuring TALK 02:08, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

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alone

1. Of or by itself; by themselves; without any thing more or any one else; without a sharer; only.
   • Man shall not live by bread alone. —Luke iv. 4. Here, “bread alone” means bread and nothing else.
2. Unique; without peer or equal:
   • Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare. -- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Both senses seem worded as adjectives. Both usage examples seem to show postpositioned adjectival usage. Adjective section misses these senses, but wording seems so early-last-century. I hope the translators noticed the problem in their work. Needs to be moved. Brought here because translators complain about too may ttbcs and checktrans. DCDuring TALK 02:01, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Delete. In "dough rises alone", the meaning is not immediately obvious that the bread rises by itself, even though alone is an adverb. Instead, we have a conception of a an isolated lump of dough that rises without anybody tending to it.

For the second definition, the counterexample "Euclid looks at Beauty alone", in construction similar to "Euclid looks at her often", makes that definition as an adverb farcical. VNNS 08:11, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Comment: VNNS (talk • contribs) has effected the deletion of these senses and kept their translation tables.​—msh210℠ 16:54, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

closed, senses have been removed a while ago already. -- Prince Kassad 09:18, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Used after what it modifies.

HI, I've found the term postmodifier, which is quite wide, and postpositive. --Backinstadiums (talk) 16:38, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

after NP - adjective vs. adverb

re e.g. "The president alone has the key", it looks like this was originally classed as an adverbial use, but the RfD discussion above found it should be changed to adjective. I'd like to push back on that. alone's behaviour here is pretty unusual, and whether we class it as an adjective or an adverb, it's not going to have all the typical features of the part of speech. But I think the best argument for calling it an adverb is that adverbs perform much better than adjectives in a substitution test:

1. The president alone has the key.
   1. The president {exclusively, solely, only} has the key.
   2. {exclusively, solely, only} the president has the key.
   3. * The president {sole, lone, one} has the key.
   4. The {sole, lone, one} president has the key.
2. The power rests in the president alone.
   1. The power rests in the president {exclusively, solely, only}.
   2. The power rests in {exclusively, solely, only} the president.
   3. * The power rests in the president {sole, lone, one}.
   4. The power rests in the {sole, lone, one} president.

1.4 and 2.4 are grammatical but have completely different semantics ("there's only one president, and they have the key" - rather than "the president has the key and nobody else does"). I can't think of any other adjectives that could be used that would give rise to the original meaning.

All the adverb substitutions allow the original meaning, with 1.2 and 2.1 being the most natural. (1.1 is more likely to be read as "the president has the key and nothing else", especially with only. 2.2 is awkward at best, though, unlike 2.1, there's no ambiguity about whether the adverb attaches to the verb or the noun.)

Also, to be clear, modifying a NP does not automatically force the choice of adjective over adverb, per examples like:

1. She ate almost the whole pizza.
2. Mainly bats and dogs carry rabies.

But as with other syntactic oddities that are far from prototypical examples of any PoS, our choice of PoS header will be a minor contribution to the reader's understanding compared to the more important concerns of selecting good usage examples, organizing senses/subsenses well with appropriate labels, and usage notes. Colin M (talk) 14:32, 27 March 2021 (UTC)