Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy (born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr.; July 20, 1933 – June 13, 2023) was an American writer who authored twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories, spanning the Western and postapocalyptic genres. He was known for his graphic depictions of violence and his unique writing style, recognizable by a sparse use of punctuation and attribution. McCarthy is widely regarded as one of the greatest American novelists.

McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, although he was raised primarily in Tennessee. In 1951, he enrolled in the University of Tennessee, but dropped out to join the U.S. Air Force. His debut novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1965. Awarded literary grants, McCarthy was able to travel to southern Europe, where he wrote his second novel, Outer Dark (1968). Suttree (1979), like his other early novels, received generally positive reviews, but was not a commercial success. A MacArthur Fellowship enabled him to travel to the American Southwest, where he researched and wrote his fifth novel, Blood Meridian (1985). Although it initially garnered a lukewarm critical and commercial reception, it has since been regarded as his magnum opus, with some labeling it the Great American Novel.

McCarthy first experienced widespread success with All the Pretty Horses (1992), for which he received both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was followed by The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998), completing The Border Trilogy. His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men received mixed reviews. His 2006 novel The Road won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.

Many of McCarthy's works have been adapted into film. The 2007 film adaptation of No Country for Old Men was a critical and commercial success, winning four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The films All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and Child of God were also adapted from his works of the same names, and Outer Dark was turned into a 15-minute short. McCarthy had a play adapted into a 2011 film, The Sunset Limited.

McCarthy worked with the Santa Fe Institute, a multidisciplinary research center, where he published the essay "The Kekulé Problem" (2017), which explores the human unconscious and the origin of language. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2012. His final novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, were published on October 25, 2022, and December 6, 2022, respectively.

## Life

### Early life

Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 20, 1933, one of six children of Gladys Christina McGrail and Charles Joseph McCarthy. His family was Irish Catholic. In 1937, the family relocated to Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father worked as a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority. The family first lived on Noelton Drive in the upscale Sequoyah Hills subdivision, but by 1941, had settled in a house on Martin Mill Pike in South Knoxville. McCarthy later said, "We were considered rich because all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks." Among his childhood friends was Jim Long (1930–2012), who was later depicted as J-Bone in Suttree.

McCarthy attended St. Mary's Parochial School and Knoxville Catholic High School, and was an altar boy at Knoxville's Church of the Immaculate Conception. As a child, McCarthy saw no value in school, preferring to pursue his own interests. He described a moment when his teacher asked the class about their hobbies. McCarthy answered eagerly, as he later said, "I was the only one with any hobbies and I had every hobby there was ... name anything, no matter how esoteric. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home."

In 1951, he began attending the University of Tennessee, studying liberal arts. He became interested in writing after a professor asked him to repunctuate a collection of eighteenth-century essays for inclusion in a textbook. McCarthy left college in 1953 to join the U.S. Air Force. While stationed in Alaska, McCarthy read books voraciously, which he claimed was the first time he had done so. He returned to college in 1957, where he majored in English and published two stories, "Wake for Susan" and "A Drowning Incident" in the student literary magazine, The Phoenix, writing under the name C. J. McCarthy, Jr. For these, he won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960. In 1959, McCarthy dropped out of college and left for Chicago.

For purposes of his writing career, McCarthy changed his first name from Charles to Cormac to avoid confusion, and comparison, with ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's dummy Charlie McCarthy. Cormac had been a family nickname given to his father by his Irish aunts. Other sources say he changed his name to honor the Irish chieftain Cormac MacCarthy, who constructed Blarney Castle.

After marrying fellow student Lee Holleman in 1961, McCarthy "moved to a shack with no heat and running water in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains outside of Knoxville". There, the couple had a son, Cullen, in 1962. When writer James Agee's childhood home was being demolished in Knoxville that year, McCarthy used the site's bricks to build fireplaces inside his Sevier County shack. While Lee cared for the baby and tended to the chores of the house, Cormac asked her to get a day job so he could focus on his novel writing. Dismayed with the situation, she moved to Wyoming, where she filed for divorce and landed her first job teaching.

### Early writing career (1965–1991)

Random House published McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper, in 1965. He had finished the novel while working part time at an auto-parts warehouse in Chicago and submitted the manuscript "blindly" to Albert Erskine of Random House. Erskine continued to edit McCarthy's work for the next 20 years. Upon its release, critics noted its similarity to the work of Faulkner and praised McCarthy's striking use of imagery. The Orchard Keeper won a 1966 William Faulkner Foundation Award for notable first novel.

While living in the French Quarter in New Orleans, McCarthy was expelled from a \$40-a-month room for failing to pay his rent. When he traveled the country, McCarthy always carried a 100-watt bulb in his bag so he could read at night, no matter where he was sleeping.

In the summer of 1965, using a Traveling Fellowship award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, McCarthy shipped out aboard the liner Sylvania hoping to visit Ireland. On the ship, he met Englishwoman Anne DeLisle, who was working on the ship as a dancer and singer. In 1966, they were married in England. Also in 1966, he received a Rockefeller Foundation grant, which he used to travel around Southern Europe before landing in Ibiza, where he wrote his second novel, Outer Dark (1968). Afterward, he returned to the United States with his wife, where Outer Dark was published to generally favorable reviews.

In 1969, the couple moved to Louisville, Tennessee, and purchased a dairy barn, which McCarthy renovated, doing the stonework himself. According to DeLisle, the couple lived in "total poverty", bathing in a lake. DeLisle claimed, "Someone would call up and offer him \$2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week." While living in the barn, he wrote his next book, Child of God (1973). Like Outer Dark before it, Child of God was set in southern Appalachia. In 1976, McCarthy separated from Anne DeLisle and moved to El Paso, Texas.

In 1974, Richard Pearce of PBS contacted McCarthy and asked him to write the screenplay for an episode of Visions, a television drama series. Beginning in early 1975, and armed with only "a few photographs in the footnotes to a 1928 biography of a famous pre-Civil War industrialist William Gregg as inspiration", McCarthy and Pearce spent a year traveling the South to research the subject of industrialization there. McCarthy completed the screenplay in 1976 and the episode, titled The Gardener's Son, aired on January 6, 1977. Numerous film festivals abroad screened it. The episode was nominated for two Primetime Emmy awards in 1977.

In 1979, McCarthy published his semiautobiographical Suttree, which he had written over 20 years before, based on his experiences in Knoxville on the Tennessee River. Jerome Charyn likened it to a doomed Huckleberry Finn.

In 1981, McCarthy was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship worth \$236,000. Saul Bellow, Shelby Foote, and others had recommended him to the organization. The grant enabled him to travel the American Southwest to research his next novel, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985). The book is violent, with The New York Times declaring it the "bloodiest book since the Iliad. Although snubbed by many critics, the book has grown appreciably in stature in literary circles; Harold Bloom called Blood Meridian "the greatest single book since Faulkner's As I Lay Dying". In a 2006 poll of authors and publishers conducted by The New York Times Magazine to list the greatest American novels of the previous quarter-century, Blood Meridian placed third, behind Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997). Some have even suggested it is the Great American Novel. Time included it on their 2005 list of the 100 best English-language books published since 1923. At the time, McCarthy was living in a stone cottage behind an El Paso shopping center, which he described as "barely habitable".

As of 1991, none of McCarthy's novels had sold more than 5,000 hardcover copies, and "for most of his career, he did not even have an agent". He was labeled the "best unknown novelist in America".

### Success and acclaim (1992–2013)

After working with McCarthy for twenty years, Albert Erskine retired from Random House in 1992. McCarthy turned to Alfred A. Knopf, where he fell under the editorial advisement of Gary Fisketjon. As a final favor to Erskine, McCarthy agreed to his first interview ever, with Richard B. Woodward of The New York Times.

McCarthy finally received widespread recognition following the publication of All the Pretty Horses (1992), when it won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It became a New York Times bestseller, selling 190,000 hardcover copies within six months. It was followed by The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998), completing the Border Trilogy. In the midst of this trilogy came The Stonemason (first performed in 1995), his second dramatic work. McCarthy originally conceived his next work, No Country for Old Men (2005), as a screenplay before turning it into a novel. Consequently, the novel has little description of setting and is composed largely of dialogue. A western set in the 1980s, No Country for Old Men was adapted by the Coen brothers into a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards and more than 75 film awards globally.

In the early 2000s, while sleeping at an El Paso motel with his younger son, McCarthy imagined the city in 100 years: "fires up on the hill and everything being laid to waste". He wrote two pages covering the idea; four years later in Ireland he expanded the idea into his tenth novel, The Road. It follows a lone father and his young son traveling through a post-apocalyptic America, hunted by cannibals. Many of the discussions between the two were verbatim conversations McCarthy had had with his son. Released in 2006, it won international acclaim and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. McCarthy did not accept the prize in person, instead sending Sonny Mehta in his place. John Hillcoat directed the 2009 film adaptation, written by Joe Penhall, and starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee. Critics' reviews were mostly favorable: Roger Ebert found it "powerful" but lacking "emotional feeling", Peter Bradshaw noted "a guarded change of emphasis", while Dan Jolin found it to be a "faithful adaptation" of the "devastating novel".

McCarthy published the play The Sunset Limited in 2006. Critics noted it was unorthodox and may have had more in common with a novel, hence McCarthy's subtitle: "a novel in dramatic form". He later adapted it into a screenplay for a 2011 film, directed and executive produced by Tommy Lee Jones, who also starred opposite Samuel L. Jackson. Oprah Winfrey selected McCarthy's The Road as the April 2007 selection for her Book Club. As a result, McCarthy agreed to his first television interview, which aired on The Oprah Winfrey Show on June 5, 2007. The interview took place in the library of the Santa Fe Institute. McCarthy told Winfrey that he did not know any writers and much preferred the company of scientists. During the interview, he related several stories illustrating the degree of outright poverty he endured at times during his career as a writer. He also spoke about the experience of fathering a child at an advanced age, and how his son was the inspiration for The Road.

In 2012, McCarthy sold his original screenplay The Counselor to Nick Wechsler, Paula Mae Schwartz, and Steve Schwartz, who had previously produced the film adaptation of McCarthy's novel The Road. Directed by Ridley Scott, with the production finished in 2012, the film was released on October 25, 2013, to polarized critical reception. Mark Kermode of The Guardian found it "datedly naff", and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone described it as "a droning meditation on capitalism". However, Manohla Dargis of The New York Times found it "terrifying" and "seductive".

### Santa Fe Institute (2014–2023)

McCarthy was a trustee for the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), a multidisciplinary research center devoted to the study of complex adaptive systems. Unlike most members of the SFI, McCarthy did not have a scientific background. As Murray Gell-Mann explained, "There isn't any place like the Santa Fe Institute, and there isn't any writer like Cormac, so the two fit quite well together." From his work at the Santa Fe Institute, McCarthy published his first piece of nonfiction writing in his 50-year writing career. In the essay entitled "The Kekulé Problem" (2017), McCarthy analyzes a dream of August Kekulé's as a model of the unconscious mind and the origins of language. He theorizes about the nature of the unconscious mind and its separation from human language. The unconscious, according to McCarthy, "is a machine for operating an animal" and "all animals have an unconscious". McCarthy postulates that language is a purely human cultural creation and not a biologically determined phenomenon.

In 2015, McCarthy's next novel, The Passenger, was announced at a multimedia event hosted in Santa Fe by the Lannan Foundation. The book was influenced by his time among scientists; it has been described by SFI biologist David Krakauer as "full-blown Cormac 3.0—a mathematical [and] analytical novel". In March 2022, The New York Times reported that The Passenger would be released on October 25, 2022, and a second companion novel, Stella Maris, on November 22. The latter is McCarthy's first novel since Outer Dark to feature a female protagonist.

## Writing approach and style

### Syntax

McCarthy used punctuation sparsely, even replacing most commas with "and" to create polysyndetons; it has been called "the most important word in McCarthy's lexicon". He told Oprah Winfrey that he preferred "simple declarative sentences" and that he used capital letters, periods, an occasional comma, or a colon for setting off a list, but never semicolons, which he labeled as "idiocy". He did not use quotation marks for dialogue and believed there is no reason to "blot the page up with weird little marks". Erik Hage notes that McCarthy's dialogue often lacks attribution, but that "somehow ... the reader remains oriented as to who is speaking." His attitude to punctuation dated to some editing work he did for a professor of English while enrolled at the University of Tennessee; he stripped out much of the punctuation in the book being edited, which pleased the professor. McCarthy edited fellow Santa Fe Institute Fellow W. Brian Arthur's influential article "Increasing Returns and the New World of Business", published in the Harvard Business Review in 1996, removing commas from the text. He also copy edited work for physicists Lawrence M. Krauss and Lisa Randall.

Saul Bellow praised his "absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences". Richard B. Woodward has described his writing as "reminiscent of early Hemingway". Unlike earlier works such as Suttree and Blood Meridian, the majority of McCarthy's work after 1993 uses simple, restrained vocabulary.

### Themes

McCarthy's novels often depict explicit violence. Many of his works have been characterized as nihilistic, particularly Blood Meridian. Some academics dispute this, saying Blood Meridian is actually a gnostic tragedy. His later works have been characterized as highly moralistic. Erik J. Wielenberg argues that The Road depicts morality as secular and originating from individuals, such as the father, and separate from God.

The bleak outlook of the future, and the inhuman foreign antagonist Anton Chigurh of No Country for Old Men, is said to reflect the apprehension of the post-9/11 era. Many of his works portray individuals in conflict with society and acting on instinct rather than on emotion or thought. Another theme throughout many of McCarthy's works is the ineptitude or inhumanity of those in authority and particularly in law enforcement. This is seen in Blood Meridian with the murder spree the Glanton Gang initiates because of the bounties, the "overwhelmed" law enforcement in No Country for Old Men, and the corrupt police officers in All the Pretty Horses. As a result, he has been labeled the "great pessimist of American literature".

### Bilingual narrative practice

McCarthy was fluent in Spanish, having lived in Ibiza, Spain, in the 1960s and later residing in El Paso, Texas, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Isabel Soto argues that after he learned the language, in his novels "Spanish and English modulate or permeate each other", as it was "an essential part of McCarthy's expressive discourse". Katherine Sugg observes that McCarthy's writing is "often considered a 'multicultural' and 'bilingual' narrative practice, particularly for its abundant use of untranslated Spanish dialogue". Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera observes, "John Grady Cole is a native speaker of Spanish. This is also the case of several other important characters in the Border Trilogy, including Billy Parhnam  [sic], John Grady's mother (and possibly his grandfather and brothers), and perhaps Jimmy Blevins, each of whom are speakers of Spanish who were ostensibly born in the US political space into families with what are generally considered English-speaking surnames ... This is also the case of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian."

### Work ethic and process

McCarthy dedicated himself to writing full time, choosing not to work other jobs to support his career. "I always knew that I didn't want to work", McCarthy said. "You have to be dedicated, but it was my number-one priority." Early in his career, his decision not to work sometimes subjected him and his family to poverty.

Nevertheless, according to scholar Steve Davis, McCarthy had an "incredible work ethic". He preferred to work on several projects simultaneously and said, for instance, that he had four drafts in progress in the mid-2000s and for several years devoted about two hours every day to each project. He was known to conduct exhaustive research on the historical settings and regional environments found in his fiction. He edited his own writing, sometimes revising a book over the course of years or decades before deeming it fit for publication. While his research and revision were meticulous, he did not outline his plots and instead viewed writing as a "subconscious process" which should be given space for spontaneous inspiration.

After 1958, McCarthy wrote all of his literary work and correspondence with a mechanical typewriter. He originally used a Royal but went looking for a more lightweight machine ahead of a trip to Europe in the early 1960s. He bought a portable Olivetti Lettera 32 for \$50 at a Knoxville pawn shop and typed about five million words over the next five decades. He maintained it by simply "blowing out the dust with a service station hose". Book dealer Glenn Horowitz said the modest typewriter acquired "a sort of talismanic quality" through its connection to McCarthy's monumental fiction, "as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss Army knife". His Olivetti was auctioned in December 2009 at Christie's, with the auction house estimating it would fetch between \$15,000 and \$20,000. It sold for \$254,500, with proceeds donated to the Santa Fe Institute. McCarthy replaced it with an identical model, bought for him by his friend John Miller for \$11 plus \$19.95 for shipping.

## Personal life and views

McCarthy was a teetotaler. According to Richard B. Woodward, "McCarthy doesn't drink anymore – he quit 16 years ago [i.e. in 1976] in El Paso, with one of his young girlfriends – and Suttree reads like a farewell to that life. 'The friends I do have are simply those who quit drinking,' he says. 'If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking'."

In the late 1990s, McCarthy moved to Tesuque, New Mexico, north of Santa Fe, with his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their son, John. McCarthy and Winkley divorced in 2006.

In 2013, a Twitter account impersonating McCarthy (@CormacCMcCarthy) was created by Scottish writer Michael Crossan, quickly amassing several thousand followers and recognition by former site owner Jack Dorsey. Five hours after the account's creation, McCarthy's publisher confirmed that the account was fake and that McCarthy did not own a computer. In 2018, another account impersonating McCarthy (@CormacMcCrthy) was created. In 2021, it was briefly marked verified following a viral tweet, after which his agent confirmed that the account was again a fake.

In 2016, a hoax spread on Twitter claiming that McCarthy had died, with USA Today even repeating the information. The Los Angeles Times responded to the hoax with the headline, "Cormac McCarthy isn't dead. He's too tough to die."

### Politics

McCarthy did not publicly reveal his political opinions. A resident of Santa Fe with a traditionalist disposition, he once expressed disapproval of the city and the people there: "If you don't agree with them politically, you can't just agree to disagree—they think you're crazy." Academic David Holloway writes that "McCarthy's writing can be read as either liberal or conservative, or as both simultaneously, depending on the politics that readers themselves bring with them to the act of reading the work".

In the 1980s, McCarthy and Edward Abbey considered covertly releasing wolves into southern Arizona to restore their decimated population.

### Science and literature

In one of his few interviews, McCarthy revealed that he respected only authors who "deal with issues of life and death", citing Henry James and Marcel Proust as examples of writers who do not. "I don't understand them ... To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange", he said. Regarding his own literary constraints when writing novels, McCarthy said he was "not a fan of some of the Latin American writers, magical realism. You know, it's hard enough to get people to believe what you're telling them without making it impossible. It has to be vaguely plausible." He cited Moby-Dick (1851) as his favorite novel. Along with Moby-Dick, McCarthy regarded The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Ulysses (1922), and The Sound and the Fury (1929) as "great" novels.

Socially, McCarthy had an aversion to other writers, preferring the company of scientists. He voiced his admiration for scientific advances: "What physicists did in the 20th century was one of the extraordinary flowerings ever in the human enterprise." At MacArthur reunions, McCarthy shunned his fellow writers to fraternize instead with scientists like physicist Murray Gell-Mann and whale biologist Roger Payne. Of all of his interests, McCarthy stated, "Writing is way, way down at the bottom of the list."

### Death

McCarthy died at his home in Santa Fe on June 13, 2023, at the age of 89. Stephen King said McCarthy was "maybe the greatest American novelist of my time ... He was full of years and created a fine body of work, but I still mourn his passing."

## Legacy

In 2003, literary critic Harold Bloom named McCarthy as one of the four major living American novelists, alongside Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and Philip Roth. Bloom's 1994 book The Western Canon had listed Child of God, Suttree, and Blood Meridian among the works of contemporary literature he predicted would endure and become "canonical". Bloom reserved his highest praise for Blood Meridian, which he called "the greatest single book since Faulkner's As I Lay Dying", and though he held less esteem for McCarthy's other novels he said that "to have written even one book so authentically strong and allusive, and capable of the perpetual reverberation that Blood Meridian possesses more than justifies him. ... He has attained genius with that book."

A comprehensive archive of McCarthy's personal papers is preserved at the Wittliff Collections, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas. The McCarthy papers consists of 98 boxes (46 linear feet). The acquisition of the Cormac McCarthy Papers resulted from years of ongoing conversations between McCarthy and Southwestern Writers Collection founder, Bill Wittliff, who negotiated the proceedings. The Southwestern Writers Collection/Wittliff Collections also holds The Wolmer Collection of Cormac McCarthy, which consists of letters between McCarthy and bibliographer J. Howard Woolmer, and four other related collections.

According to J. T. Barbarese, a professor of English and writing at Rutgers University, "McCarthy was, if not our greatest novelist, certainly our greatest stylist. The obsession not only with the origins of evil, but also history. And those two themes intersect again and again and again in McCarthy's writing."

Following his death in June 2023, Hillel Italie of the Associated Press wrote that McCarthy transcended and reinvented the genre of Western novels, citing the comments of novelist James Wade and writer Rachel Kushner.

Journalist Nick Romeo wrote an essay in Scientific American demonstrating his thesis that McCarthy's work is based on his curiosity about science.

American writer (1933–2023)

20th-century American dramatists and playwrights

20th-century American short story writers

21st-century American dramatists and playwrights

21st-century American non-fiction writers

21st-century American short story writers

American male dramatists and playwrights

James Tait Black Memorial Prize recipients

United States Air Force personnel of the Korean War

Writers of historical fiction set in the modern age


English nouns

English nouns form the largest category of words in English, both in terms of the number of different words and in terms of how often they are used in typical texts. The three main categories of English nouns are common nouns, proper nouns, and pronouns. A defining feature of English nouns is their ability to inflect for number, as through the plural –s morpheme. English nouns primarily function as the heads of noun phrases, which prototypically function at the clause level as subjects, objects, and predicative complements. These phrases are the only English phrases whose structure includes determinatives and predeterminatives, which add abstract specifying meaning such as definiteness and proximity. Like nouns in general, English nouns typically denote physical objects, but they also denote actions (e.g., get up and have a stretch), characteristics (e.g., this red is lovely), relations in space (e.g., closeness), and just about anything at all. Taken all together, these features separate English nouns from the language's other lexical categories, such as adjectives and verbs.

For the purposes of this article, English nouns include English pronouns, but not English determiners.

## Subtypes

English nouns are classified into three major subtypes as common nouns, proper nouns, and pronouns, each with its own typical syntactic behaviour.

### Proper nouns

Proper nouns are a class of words such as December, Canada, Leah, and Johnson that occur within noun phrases (NPs) that are proper names, though not all proper names contain proper nouns (e.g., General Electric is a proper name with no proper noun). The central cases of proper names, according to The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, "are expressions which have been conventionally adopted as the name of a particular entity." A prominent category of proper names are the ones assigned to particular people or animals (Elizabeth, Fido). Others include particular places (New Zealand, the United States of America) and institutions (Cambridge University, the United States Senate). While proper names may be realized by multi-word constituents, a proper noun is word-level unit in English. Thus, Zealand, for example, is a proper noun, but New Zealand, though a proper name, is not a proper noun.

Unlike some common nouns, proper nouns do not typically show number contrast in English. Most proper nouns in English are singular and lack a plural form, though some may instead be plural and lack a singular form. For example, we typically expect Michigan but not \*Michigans and the Philippines but not \*Philippine. Proper nouns also differ from common nouns in that they typically lack either a determinative or determinative contrast. For instance, we typically expect Michigan but not \*a Michigan, and though the Bahamas includes the determinative the, the determinative cannot normally be varied (compare \*a Bahama and \*some Bahamas). Finally, proper nouns differ from common nouns in that they typically cannot be modified by restrictive modifiers.

In English, the features that distinguish proper nouns from common nouns do not necessarily apply in the rare situations in which proper nouns lack unique denotation. For example, London typically refers to a unique place, but someone trying to disambiguate between two places named London might pluralize it (Which of the Londons are you referring to?), add a determinative (Do you mean the London in Ontario?), or add a restrictive modifier (Do you mean the London in Ontario?).

### Pronouns

English pronouns are a closed category of words that have a variety of features distinguishing them from common and proper nouns. Unlike common nouns, pronouns are mostly deictic and anaphoric pro-forms. In the clause I like you, for instance, I and you are deictic in that their meanings can only be understood in relation to the context of the utterance. In the clause Tell Anne I want to talk to her, on the other hand, her is anaphoric in that the pronoun derives its meaning from its antecedent (Anne, in this case).

Also unlike common nouns, English pronouns show distinctions in case (e.g., I, me, mine), person (e.g., I, you) and gender (e.g., he, she). Though both common nouns and pronouns show number distinction in English, they do so differently: common nouns tend to take an inflectional ending (–s) to mark plurals, but pronouns typically do not. (The pronoun one is an exception, as in I like those ones.) English pronouns are also more limited than common nouns in their ability to take dependents. For instance, while common nouns can often be preceded by a determinative (e.g., the car), pronouns cannot.

In English conversation, pronouns are roughly as frequent as other nouns. In fiction, pronouns are about one third of all nouns, and in news and academic English, pronouns are a small minority of nouns (\<10%).

### Common nouns

Common nouns are defined as those that are neither proper nouns nor pronouns. They are the most numerous and the most frequently used in English.

Common nouns can be further divided into count and non-count nouns. A count noun can take a number as its determiner (e.g., -20 degrees, zero calories, one cat, two bananas, 276 dollars). These nouns tend to designate individually identifiable entities, whereas a non-count noun designates a continuum or an undifferentiated mass (air, cheese, lots of gravel some water, enough heat). The count and non-count distinction also affects what other determiners can occur with the nouns: singular count nouns can occur with a but not some (e.g., a chair but not usually \*some chair) while non-count nouns can occur with some but not a (e.g., some furniture but not \*a furniture). Many common nouns have both count and non-count senses. For example, beer has a non-count sense in she was drinking beer but a count sense in she drank another beer.

## Morphology

### Inflectional

A defining property of English nouns is their ability to inflect for number (i.e., singular or plural). In addition to number, English pronouns can inflect for case, a feature shared by some NPs (see discussion of case below) but not common nouns themselves.

#### Common nouns

Common nouns in English have little inflectional morphology, inflecting only for number. In modern English writing, the plural is usually formed with the –s morpheme, which can be realized phonetically as /s/, /z/, or /əz/. For example, the singular nouns cat, dog, and bush are pluralized as cats (s = /s/), dogs (s = /z/), and bushes (es = /əz/), respectively. Irregularly, English nouns are marked as plural in other ways, often inheriting the plural morphology of older forms of English or the languages that they are borrowed from. Plural forms from Old English resulted from vowel mutation (e.g., foot/feet), adding –en (e.g., ox/oxen), or making no change at all (e.g., this sheep/those sheep). English has also borrowed the plural forms of loanwords from various languages, such as Latin (e.g., stimulus/stimuli) and Greek (e.g., criterion/criteria).

Some varieties of English use different methods of marking the plural, many of which fall into one of three patterns. First, the plural morpheme may be absent when another word already indicates that the noun is plural. In the clause two girl just left, for instance, speakers of some varieties would not use the plural morpheme on the noun girl because the determiner two already marks the noun phrase as plural. Dem, which is derived from them, is often used without the plural morpheme, as in dem book (rather than dem books). This method of plural marking occurs in Gullah and Caribbean English among other varieties. Second, the plural morpheme may be absent specifically in noun phrases denoting weights and measures but not in other situations. Thus, some varieties may produce noun phrases like ten mile (rather than ten miles) while still using the plural morpheme in other contexts (e.g., two girls). This method of plural marking for weights and measures occurs in certain rural varieties of Southern U.S. English. Third, irregular plural nouns may be regularized and use the –s morpheme. This may happen when the plural is not otherwise marked (e.g., sheeps for sheep), when the plural is typically marked with a morpheme other than –s (e.g., oxes for oxen), or when the plural is typically formed through vowel mutation (e.g., foots for feet). In the case of plurals marked by vowel mutation, some varieties may double mark the plural (e.g., feets). Regularization of plural marking occurs in several Englishes, including African-American English.

Traditional grammars suggest that English nouns can also take genitive case endings, as in the –'s in the cat's paws. Grammars informed by modern linguistics, however, analyze this ending as applying to entire noun phrases rather than the nouns themselves. In the phrase the cat with brown fur's paws, for example, the possessor is realized by the entire noun phrase the cat with brown fur, not just the noun fur. This analysis can be illustrated in bracketed notation:

- [NP [NP the cat]'s paws]
- [NP [NP the cat with brown fur]'s paws]

#### Pronouns

Those types that are indisputably pronouns are the personal pronouns, relative pronouns, interrogative pronouns, and reciprocal pronouns. The following table presents the Modern Standard English pronouns (for pronouns in other dialects, see the main article on English pronouns). Nominative case is usually used for subjects (e.g., I went) and accusative for objects (e.g., Help me). Reflexives are typically objects when the subject and object are the same person or people. Genitives are used for possession, belonging, sources, ancestry, etc. The independent genitive typically forms a noun phrase all on its own (e.g., Mine works), while the dependent genitive usually occurs together with a head noun on which it depends (e.g., [My copy] works.).

† Interrogative only (e.g., Whose is this?). Relative whose is not possible (e.g.,\*This is Kim's, whose we forgot).

### Derivational (for common nouns)

The most common noun-forming suffixes in English are -tion, -ism, -ity, and -ness. For example, the verb activate + -tion becomes the noun activation. English nouns can also be formed by conversion (no change, e.g., run [verb] → run [noun]) and compounding (putting two bases together, e.g., grand + mother → grandmother).

There are also many prefixes that can be attached to English nouns to change their meaning. A small list of examples include anti-, bi-, dis-, hyper-, mega-, non-, & re- (e.g., re- + vision → revision).

## Semantics of nouns and noun phrases

English noun phrases typically inherit the denotation of the head noun. On top of this, they may have many other semantic characteristics including definiteness, reference, specificity, number, quantification, gender, and person.

### Denotation and reference

English nouns prototypically denote entities. The denotation of an expression is its literal meaning, such as those meanings listed within monolingual dictionaries. For example, one of the things that apple denotes is "a common, round fruit produced by the tree Malus domestica, cultivated in temperate climates."

English noun phrases can also refer to entities. A noun phrase is referential if it is used to pick out an entity that is distinguished by properties other those inherent in the meaning of the noun phrase itself. For instance, the noun phrase his dog in Sam found his dog picks out a particular entity (a dog) that is distinguishable by properties not expressed in the meaning of dog (such as breed, color, and the like).

Not all noun phrases refer. In fact, some kinds of noun phrases are inherently non-referential. These include negative, interrogative, and bare role noun phrases as well as noun phrases with either or each functioning as a determinative. The underlined NPs in the following examples do not refer:

1. Negative: Nobody came.
2. Interrogative: Who likes ice cream?
3. Bare role: She was elected president.
4. Either as determinative: Either team might win the game.
5. Each as determinative: She interviewed each child in turn.
6. Dummy pronoun: It's raining.
7. Existential there: There's a problem.

### Countability and number

Common nouns may be divided into count nouns and non-count nouns. English nouns typically have both count and non-count senses, though for a given noun one sense typically dominates. For example, apple is usually countable (two apples), but it also has a non-count sense (e.g., this pie is full of apple). When discussing different types of something, a count form is available for almost any noun (e.g., This shop carries many cheeses. = "many types of cheese").

Non-count nouns denote things that, when put together, remain the same thing. For example, if I have luggage and you give me more luggage, I still just have luggage. Count nouns fail this test: if you have an apple, and I give you more apple or more apples, you no longer just have an apple.

Modern English marks a division between singular and plural number. (Old English pronouns also marked the dual number.) Singular number restricts the denotation of the noun to the set of singularities. Plural number is often said to mean more than one, but, in fact, it restricts the denotation of the noun to the set of non-singularities. That is, in English, plural nouns are appropriate for quantities denoted by all the real numbers, including 0 and other quantities smaller than 1, except exactly ±1.

The semantic number and grammatical number of a particular NP may not match. For example, with collective nouns such as committee, which denote a unit composed of multiple individuals, agreement can either be singular because the noun is morphologically singular (e.g., The committee has not yet come to a decision) or plural because it is semantically plural (e.g.,The committee have not yet come to a decision).

### Gender and animacy

Modern English has lost the system of grammatical gender that was present in Old English, and while there is some disagreement over what has replaced it, generally speaking English is said to have a system of "natural gender", which applies only to the pronouns. A natural gender is one "in which there is a clear correlation between masculine and feminine nouns and biological traits in the referent." But whether this accurately characterizes the English gender system is disputed.

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language argues that English has a "weakly grammaticalized" gender, which is based only on pronoun agreement. This gender system involves two subsystems: one involving the distinctions between the personal pronouns he, she, and it and another involving the distinctions between the relative pronouns who and which. In the personal pronoun subsystem, nouns can be classified according to whether they are compatible with one, two, or three of these three personal pronouns. Single-gender and dual-gender nouns can be subclassified according to which specific pronouns they agree with. This results in seven classes:

- Single-gender masculine nouns (e.g., boy, stepson)
- Single-gender feminine nouns (e.g., girl, stepdaughter, actress)
- Single-gender neuter nouns (e.g., arrival, beer)
- Dual-gender masculine/feminine nouns (e.g., actor, doctor)
- Dual-gender masculine/neuter nouns (e.g., bull, brother)
- Dual-gender feminine/neuter nouns (e.g., cow, sister, ship)
- Triple-gender nouns (e.g., baby, dog)

These classes are not equally common. For instance, single-gender neuter nouns account for a large majority of common nouns while dual-gender masculine/neuter nouns account for only male animal species and certain kinship terms that can apply to both humans and animals.

In the relative pronoun subsystem, nouns can be classified according to whether they agree with who or which. Nouns that agree with who are called personal (or animate) nouns while nouns that agree with which are called non-personal (or inanimate) nouns. Though there is substantial overlap between nonpersonal nouns and neuter nouns and between personal nouns and masculine and feminine nouns, the overlaps are not perfect. For instance, a ship can agree with either it or she but can only agree with which (not who). Similarly, which can serve as an antecedent to he or she, as in there is a dog which attacked his/her owner.

## The syntax of nouns and noun phrases

Some defining properties of English nouns are that they function as the heads of NPs and that they can be specified by determinatives and modified by pre-head adjective phrases. A defining property of English NPs is that they prototypically function at the clause level as subjects, objects, and predicative complements.

### Functions

English nouns function as the head of a nominal (see §Internal structure below), which in turn mostly functions as the head of an NP. At the clause-level, English NPs typically function as subjects, objects, and predicative complements. The following table shows these typical functions and the other functions NPs can take:

Nominals (see §Internal structure, below), also appear as pre-head modifier in a nominal (e.g., a two day conference).

### Internal structure

A simple noun phrase like some good ideas has a head nominal, a phrase that excludes any determinative (here, some), and that nominal, in turn, has a head noun (here ideas) along with any modifiers or complements. Roughly speaking, the nominal includes everything after the determinative (similar to the way a clause has a verb phrase that includes basically everything after the subject). The following tree shows the internal structure of an NP with all the main types of dependents: modifiers, a determinative, a predeterminative (labeled here as a kind of modifier), and a complement. (The triangles are a convention to simplify the representation of the inner structures of phrases when it is less relevant.)

#### Determinatives

A basic English NP splits into an optional determinative (usually a determiner phrase or a genitive NP) and a head nominal (e.g., [many] [good people]). In the diagram above, the determinative is the, and the head nominal is preposterous ideas about exercise that Bill has. The determinative, if present, always precedes the nominal and is licensed by the head noun. That is, it must agree in number and countability (e.g., many people, \*many person, some police, \*a police) with the head noun.

Though the determinative function is typically realized by determiner phrases, they may also be realized by other phrases. Noun phrases that realize the determinative function are typically in the genitive case (e.g., your interview) but do not need to be (e.g., this size home). Determiners can also be realized by prepositional phrases, such as up to a dozen in the noun phrase up to a dozen agencies.

#### Predeterminatives

Inside the NP, but outside the nominal, there are also predeterminatives, as exemplified by all in the tree diagram above. In this case, all has a specifying role rather than a modifying role in the noun phrase, much like the determinative the, but the determinative function has already been filled. To account for noun phrases like these, some grammars (such as Oxford Modern English Grammar and A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language) also recognize the function of predeterminative (or predeterminer). Other grammars offer different accounts of these constructions. For example, the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language classifies them as a "predeterminer modifier".

Like the determinative function, the predeterminative function is typically realized by determiner phrases. However, they can also be realized by noun phrases (e.g., three times the speed) and adverb phrases (e.g., twice the population).

#### Modifiers

Inside the nominal, modifiers can be divided into pre-head (before the noun) and post-head (after the noun). Adjective phrases are the prototypical pre-head modifiers of nouns, as exemplified by preposterous in the tree diagram above. Adjective-like prepositional phrases can also function as pre-head modifiers of nouns. For example, the prepositional phrase under threat functions as a pre-head modifier in the noun phrase the under-threat postal service. The adjective-like nature of these prepositional phrases is indicated by the tendency for them to be hyphenated in writing and the fact that they can typically be paraphrased with an adjective phrase (compare the endangered postal service). Similarly, adjective-like clauses can function as pre-head modifiers of nouns. In the noun phrase pay-as-you-go SIM card, for instance, the clause pay as you go functions as a pre-head modifier. Like the adjective-like prepositions, these clauses tend to be hyphenated in writing.

Other pre-head modifiers of nouns include nominals. In the noun phrase Nirvana's classic early nineties album, for example, the nominal early nineties modifies the noun album. The nominal's status a modifier can be made clearer by paraphrasing the noun phrase that contains it: Nirvana's classic album from the early nineties, in which from the early nineties is more clearly a modifier. Verb phrases can also function as pre-head modifiers of nouns. For instance, the verb phrase regularly dripping can function as a pre-head modifier in the noun phrase a regularly dripping faucet. The fact that dripping can be and is modified by a manner adverb (regularly) but cannot be modified by a degree adverb (such as very) indicates that these pre-head modifiers are verb phrases rather than adjective phrases because verbs can typically be modified by manner but not degree adverbs while adjectives can typically be modified by degree but not manner adverbs. Another pre-head modifier of nouns is determiner phrases. For example, the determiner phrase two in the noun phrase these two images functions as a pre-head modifier. While determiners that occur before nouns tend to function as determinatives, noun phrases can contain only one determinative, so additional determiner phrases must have some other function. In these two images, the determiner phrase these fills the determinative function, so the additional determiner phrase two must instead be analyzed as a pre-head modifier. Some grammars label these determiner phrases postdeterminers. Rarely, an adverb phrase can function as a pre-head modifier of nouns. In the noun phrase an almost victory, for example, the adverb phrase almost functions as a pre-head modifier.

Relative clauses, as exemplified by that Bill has in the tree diagram above, are common as post-head modifiers. Prepositional phrases are another common variety of post-head modifier. In the noun phrase an apple in a tree, for example, the prepositional phrase in a tree functions as a post-head modifier. Adjective phrases can also function as post-head modifiers. Some of these adjective phrases are reduced relative clauses, such as balloons full of helium (compare balloons that were full of helium). Others are post-positive adjective phrases, such as the attorney general. Noun phrases themselves can function as post-head adjuncts in noun phrases. In the noun phrase shoes that size, for instance, the noun phrase that size functions as a post-head modifier. Certain determiners (namely, each, enough, less, and more) can head determiner phrases that function as post-head modifiers of noun phrases, as in the determiner phrase each in three dollars each. Rarely, adverb phrases can function as post-head modifiers, such as the adverb phrase soon in the noun phrase some day soon.

External modifiers exist inside the NP but outside the nominal. These modifiers are often adverb phrases, as exemplified by even in the tree diagram above. External modifiers can also be realized by prepositional phrases (e.g., by far the greatest ally) and noun phrases (e.g., every bit a philosopher). External modifiers can only attach to the beginnings or ends of noun phrases. When positioned at the beginning, they occur before any predeterminative, determinative, or internal modifier. In the noun phrase even all their best songs, for instance, the external modifier (even) must occur before the predeterminative (all), determinative (their), and internal modifier (best). Some external modifiers can move freely between the beginning and the end of their noun phrase. For example, by far the greatest ally can also be written the greatest ally by far.

#### Complements

A nominal can occasionally include a complement, a dependent licensed by the head noun. Usually, these are prepositional phrases or subordinate clauses. The head of such prepositional phrases is typically of, as in our review of your application or your receipt of the envelope. In some of these cases, the complement and noun can be compared to a verb and direct object pair (we reviewed your application; you received the envelope). In other cases, the head is not of, as exemplified by about exercise in the tree diagram above. Clauses that function as complements in noun phrases can be either finite (a realization that it is important) or non-finite (a requirement for them to do it). As with prepositional phrase complements of nouns, certain clause complements of nouns can be compared to verb and complement pairs (they realized that it is important; somebody required them to do it).

Nouns can also be complemented by noun phrases. Unusually, these noun phrase complements occur before the head noun. For example, the noun phrase kinesiology functions as a pre-head complement in the larger noun phrase a kinesiology student. The noun phrase's status a complement can be made clearer by paraphrasing the noun phrase that contains it: a student of kinesiology, in which of kinesiology is more clearly a complement.

When there is a complement, usually there's only one, but up to three are possible (e.g., a bet for \$10 with DJ that it wasn't true.)

### Order of elements in noun phrases

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language proposes the following rigid order of elements within noun phrases: pre-head external modifiers (peripheral modifiers and predeterminatives), determinatives, pre-head internal modifiers, pre-head complement, head, post-head internal dependents, and post-head external modifiers (emphatic reflexives and focusing modifiers). These elements are present in the example below:

These ordering constraints are called rigid because violating them results in an ungrammatical noun phrase. For example, the very happy linguistics students could not become the linguistics very happy students. Other ordering constraints are labile, meaning that they reflect the general order of things but may be violated without producing an ungrammatical phrase. For example, pre-head internal modifiers that indicate age typically occur before those that indicate color (e.g. the new blue tie), but this order can be violated for various reasons without producing an ungrammatical phrase (e.g., The blue new tie is a possible answer to the question Which new tie will you wear?). Pre-head internal modifiers and post-head internal dependents are subject to labile ordering constraints.

#### Order of pre-head internal modifiers

Much attention has been given to the order of pre-noun internal modifiers in both academic and popular writings on English grammar. Many proposed orders appeal to semantic categories. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, for example, proposes the following order for residual pre-head modifiers: evaluative (e.g., good, annoying), general property (e.g., big, cruel), age (e.g., new, ancient), color (e.g., black, crimson), provenance (e.g., French, Chinese), manufacture (e.g., cotton, carved), type (e.g., passenger aircraft, men's department). Mark Forsyth suggests that adjectives must occur in the following order: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose. These orders are similar to the order as analyzed by Charles Darling, which offers this order: observation, size, shape, age, color, origin, material, qualifier. The following table summarizes these orders:

These ordering constraints correctly predict noun phrases like a beautiful old Italian touring car, in which beautiful is evaluative (or opinion/observation), old an age, Italian an origin (or provenance), and touring a type (or purpose/qualifier). However, Mark Liberman notes that these ordering constraints can lead to incorrect predictions: ugly is an opinion and big a size, but corpus data shows that big ugly is far more common than ugly big. Liberman also notes that these orders fail to account for strong preferences within categories. For example, long and tall are both sizes, but long tall is generally preferred to tall long.

Stefanie Wulff summarizes and evaluates a variety of other factors that predict the order of pre-head modifiers in English noun phrases. From a phonological perspective, shorter modifiers typically occur before longer ones, other things being equal. For example, the long intelligent book is generally preferred to the intelligent long book. From a semantic perspective, the more inherent qualities of a thing tend to occur closer to the noun. For instance, solid stainless steel is generally preferred to stainless solid steel because the stainlessness of stainless steel is more inherent than the solidness of solid steel. Also from a semantic perspective, modifiers that "are less dependent on comparison are put nearer to the head noun." For example, the redness of a file can be determined without comparing it to another file but the smallness of a file can only be determined by comparison with another file. Thus, a small red file is generally preferable to a red small file. From a pragmatic perspective, modifiers that "are remembered most easily upon the occurrence of the noun" tend to occur closer to the noun. For instance, blonde tends to be more closely associated with hair than nice is, so nice blonde hair is more likely than blonde nice hair. Also from a pragmatic perspective, more frequently used modifiers tend to occur before less frequently used modifiers. For example, big is a more frequently used word than cold, so we would expect a big cold lake rather than a cold big lake.

Some grammars have proposed multiple "zones" for pre-head modifiers in English noun phrases. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, for example, proposes four "premodification zones." The pre-central zone is filled by nongradable adjectives, particularly intensifiers such as major and numerous. The central zone consists of the most prototypical adjectives, that is, adjectives that admit intensifiers and comparison and can also appear in predicate position. Within this central zone, evaluative adjectives typically occur first, and the usual order for the rest is nonderived adjectives, then adjectives derived from verbs, and finally adjectives derived from nouns. The post-central zone includes participles and color terms. The pre-head zone includes adjectives denoting provenance, adjectives with the meaning of "relating to (noun)" (such as annual and political), and nouns. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language proposes two zones: early pre-head modifiers and residual pre-head modifiers. Early pre-head modifiers include cardinal and ordinal numbers numerals (e.g., two, second), superlative adjectives (e.g., largest, youngest), and primacy adjectives (e.g., key, primary). Residual pre-head modifiers include all other pre-head internal modifiers.

#### Order of post-head internal dependents

The category "post-head internal dependents" includes post-head modifiers and complements. Though modifiers tend not to occur between complements and their heads, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language does not characterize this tendency as a rigid ordering constraint because the order is also affected by the weight of the constituent, with lighter dependents typically occurring before heavy dependents. In the noun phrase the rumor in the city that Minakshi had decreed that no white woman could live for long within sight of her temple, for example, the modifier in the city separates the head rumor from the complement that Minakshi had decreed that no white woman could live for long within sight of her temple because the complement is relatively heavy while the modifier is relatively light.

## Nouns versus other lexical categories

### Adjectives

Nouns and adjectives in English can generally be distinguished by their grammatical features: Prototypical nouns can inflect for number while adjectives cannot. Prototypical adjectives can inflect for degree of comparison while nouns cannot. Prototypical nouns head phrases that can function as subject, direct object, and indirect object while prototypical adjectives head phrases that can function as pre-head modifier of nouns and subject-related complement. Prototypical adjectives can be modified by very while nouns cannot. Nouns can head phrases containing determinatives and predeterminatives while adjectives cannot. The following table summarizes some of these characteristics:

In noun phrases such as the boy actor, words like boy do not fall neatly into the categories noun or adjective. Boy is more like an adjective than a noun in that it functions as a pre-head modifier of a noun, which is a function prototypically filled by adjective phrases, and in that that it cannot be pluralized in this position (\*the boys actor). However, boy is more like a noun than an adjective in that it cannot be modified by very (\*the very boy actor) as adjectives typically can be and in that it cannot be separated from the head noun by an adjective (\*the boy talented actor). Further, boy is more like a noun in that it cannot occur alone as a subject-related predicative complement (\*the actor is boy). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language classifies words like boy as nouns. John Robert Ross similarly classifies it as an "adjectival noun", a noun with some adjectival properties.

Color terms also exhibit features of both nouns and adjectives. In many cases, the category of these terms can be clearly identified. For example, color terms used as subjects (blue represents hope) or complements (my favorite color is blue) appear to be typical nouns while color terms occurring attributively (the blue light) appear to be typical adjectives. Similarly, color terms marked as plural (the blues in his paintings) appear to be nouns while those marked as comparative (bluer) or superlative (bluest) appear to be adjectives. However, James D. McCawley notes a case in which color terms appear to have features of nouns and adjectives at the same time: a deep blue necktie. In this case, the modifier of blue is an adjective (deep) rather than an adverb (deeply), which suggests that the color term is a noun. However, its function appears to be the same as the blue in the blue light, which is an adjective. Bas Aarts notes that this apparent dual categorization can be avoided by treating phrases like deep blue as adjective-adjective compounds.

Phrases like the lucky in the lucky don't need to diet also present challenges. Words like lucky in this case have features typical of a noun; specifically, they appear to head phrases that (1) contain determinatives and (2) have the prototypical functions of noun phrases (such as subject, in this example). However, these words also have features of adjectives. For instance, they can be modified by very (the very lucky don't need to diet) and combine with morphemes that can typically attach only to adjectives, such as un- (the unlucky must diet). Complicating matters further, they can take as pre-head modifiers either adjectives (the ostentatious rich) or adverbs (the completely innocent). Aarts argues that phrases like these are best analyzed as noun phrases with an empty element functioning as the head, yielding an analysis like this: [NP the [AP completelyAdv innocentAdj] ∅N]. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language offers a similar analysis, calling words like lucky and innocent in these cases "fused modifier-heads". In other words, they treat these words as adjectives that have fused with an unexpressed head.

### Verbs

In English, nouns and verbs can typically be distinguished according to their grammatical features: Prototypical nouns can inflect for number while verbs cannot. Verbs take a variety of inflectional endings that nouns cannot, such as the -ing suffix of the present participle form. Nouns typically take prepositional phrases and clauses as complements while verbs typically take noun phrases and clauses as complements. The typical pre-head modifiers of nouns are adjective phrases, but the typical pre-head modifiers of verbs are adverb phrases. Nouns can head phrases containing determinatives and predeterminatives while verbs cannot. The following table summarizes some of these characteristics:

Certain words derived from nouns, specifically those ending in -ing (such as painting), can share features of both nouns and verbs. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language illustrates the gradience from verbal nouns to verbs in their present participle forms, with the earlier examples behaving more like nouns and the later examples behaving more like verbs:

1. some paintings of Brown’s
2. Brown’s paintings of his daughters
3. The painting of Brown is as skillful as that of Gainsborough.
4. Brown’s deft painting of his daughter is a delight to watch.
5. Brown’s deftly painting his daughter is a delight to watch.
6. I dislike Brown’s painting his daughter
7. I dislike Brown painting his daughter (when she ought to be at school)
8. I watched Brown painting his daughter.
9. Brown deftly painting his daughter is a delight to watch.
10. Painting his daughter, Brown noticed that his hand was shaking.
11. Brown painting his daughter that day, I decided to go for a walk.
12. The man painting the girl is Brown.
13. The silently painting man is Brown.
14. Brown is painting his daughter.

Painting(s) in [1]–[4] are unambiguously nouns. Paintings in [1] and [2] feature the plural -s morpheme associated with nouns and also head phrases containing determinatives (i.e., some and Brown's), a feature also observed in [3]–[5]. Painting in [4] is also modified by an adjective phrase (deft), further suggesting that it is a noun. Meanwhile, painting in [10]–[14] are unambiguously verbs. Of these, all but [13] take post-head noun phrase complements, a feature of verbs but not nouns. While the painting in [13] does not take a noun phrase complement, it is modified by an adverb phrase (silently), a feature typical of verbs that is also present in [5] and [9]. The troublesome cases are the ones represented by the paintings in [5]–[9], which demonstrate features of both nouns and verbs. These are often called gerunds (though the terminology can vary). The paintings in [5]–[9] are noun-like in that they are the heads of phrases functioning as either subject of direct object. The paintings in [5] and [6] are even more noun-like in that they occur with the determinative Brown's. However, the paintings in [5]–[9] are also verb-like in that they take a post-head noun phrase complement. The painting in [9] is even more verb-like in that it is modified by the adverb phrase deftly.

Linguists have offered a variety of accounts for English gerunds. For instance, Geoffrey K. Pullum and James P. Blevins both argue that gerunds are noun phrases with verb phrase heads. Other linguists, such as Richard Hudson, argue that gerunds are both verbs and nouns. Yet others, such as Bas Aarts, argue that the fact that gerunds tend to occur in the same places as noun phrases (as subject, direct object, and so on) is not enough to support that they occur within noun phrases and instead treat them as verbs that happen to be in non-canonical positions.

### Adverbs

There is typically little confusion between nouns and adverbs in English because there is no overlap in the inflectional morphology that they take (-s for nouns, -er and -est for adverbs) and they tend to cooccur with different kinds of words (e.g., nouns can head phrases containing determinatives while adverbs cannot). Further, nouns and adverbs tend to head phrases with different prototypical functions: noun phrases typically function as subjects, direct objects, and indirect objects while adverb phrases typically function as adjuncts.

Despite no overlap in the form and distribution of nouns and adverbs, some linguists suggest gradience between a certain class of nouns and adverbs. For example, Barbara M. H. Strang notes that words such as yesterday and today have features of both nouns and adverbs. They are noun like in that they can occupy typical noun phrase positions and head possessive noun phrases (e.g., yesterday's news), but unlike prototypical nouns, they cannot be made plural and do not head phrases contain determinatives. Bas Aarts notes that this argument does not actually assert any adverb-like properties but rather just a lack of certain properties of nouns, suggesting that words like yesterday and today are nouns, albeit less prototypical than some nouns.

### Determiners

There is typically little confusion between nouns and determiners in English, but certain words, namely you and we, share features of both pronouns and determiners in certain constructions, as in we students know the truth. These words resemble pronouns in that they show case contrast (compare us students), a feature that, in Modern English, is typical of pronouns but not determiners. Because they resemble pronouns in this way, Evelyne Delorme and Ray C. Dougherty treat words like us as pronouns in apposition with the noun phrases that follow them, which is an analysis that Merriam–Webster's Dictionary of English Usage also follows. Richard Hudson and Mariangela Spinillo also categorize these words as pronouns but do not assume an appositive relationship between the pronoun and the rest of the noun phrase.

However, two other features make these words resemble determiners rather than nouns. First, their phrase-initial position (we students) is typical of determiners (the students). Second, they cannot combine with other determiners (\*the we students), which suggests that they fill the same role. These characteristics have led linguists like Ray Jackendoff and Steven Paul Abney to categorize such uses of we and you as determiners. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language similarly classifies this use of we and you as "an extended, secondary use" in which words that began as pronouns have been reanalyzed as determiners.

## References and notes

Part of speech


Warwick Armstrong

Warwick Windridge Armstrong (22 May 1879 – 13 July 1947) was an Australian cricketer who played 50 Test matches between 1902 and 1921. An all-rounder, he captained Australia in ten Test matches between 1920 and 1921, and was undefeated, winning eight Tests and drawing two. Armstrong was captain of the 1920–21 Australian team which defeated the touring English 5–0: one of only three teams to win an Ashes series in a whitewash. In a Test career interrupted by the First World War, he scored 2,863 runs at an average of 38.68, including six centuries, and took 87 wickets. He was inducted into the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame in 2000.

Armstrong was a large man (6 foot 3 inches – 1.9 m tall and 21 stone – 133 kg or 294 lb) and was known as the "Big Ship". He was not a stylish batsman but his strokeplay was effective, with a sound defence and temperament. He bowled leg spin with a gentle action and while not a big turner of the ball, he relied on accuracy to dismiss opponents. He made his Test debut in 1902 against England at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) and was selected to tour England later that year where he was named as one of the Wisden Cricketers of the Year. That was the first of four tours of England. He was involved in several altercations with cricket administrators and was one of the "Big Six" who boycotted the 1912 Triangular Tournament in England after a dispute with the Australian Board of Control for International Cricket.

A talented Australian rules footballer, Armstrong briefly represented South Melbourne in the Victorian Football League before playing Test cricket. For much of his cricket career he was employed as a pavilion clerk by the Melbourne Cricket Club, who allowed him time off to play cricket. Following his retirement from Test and first-class cricket after the successful 1921 tour of England, Armstrong took a position as an agent for a scotch whisky distributor and wrote on cricket for the Sydney Evening News.

## Early life

Armstrong was born in the rural Victorian town of Kyneton in 1879, the eldest son of John and his wife Amelia (née Flynn). The marriage was across the sectarian divide, then strong in Australia: John was an Anglican; Amelia was a Catholic. The Armstrong family moved to Melbourne in 1880, settling in the inner suburb of Emerald Hill, Victoria. An inheritance enabled the family to move to a larger house, "Arra Glen" in North Caulfield, Victoria in 1888.

Armstrong attended Cumloden School, a respected sporting member of the Schools Association, a group of smaller private schools in Melbourne. By 1893, he had found himself a spot in the school XI and came to the attention of the press, catching the eye of journalists Reginald Wilmot and Tom Horan. Armstrong joined the nearby Caulfield Cricket Club and played in a senior premiership with the club at the age of 15.

The next year the St Kilda Cricket Club, one of the leading clubs in Melbourne's pennant competition, gave the youthful Armstrong a trial. In the 1896–97 season, Armstrong fell out with St Kilda and returned to Caulfield. His last years of school were at University College.

Leaving school at 19, Armstrong joined his father's former club, South Melbourne, captained by Australian Test captain Harry Trott. Armstrong was an immediate success, scoring 101 runs against University and 173 against his former club, St Kilda. He was selected to represent Victoria against Tasmania in Hobart in January 1899, as one of seven in the squad making their first-class cricket débuts. Armstrong's performance was promising, scoring six and 33 and taking four for 78 in 27 overs.

Armstrong began regular Sheffield Shield cricket in the 1899–1900 season. In his first match against New South Wales in January 1900, he dismissed Syd Gregory with his second delivery and scored 45 runs in the second innings. In the Pennant season for South Melbourne, Armstrong scored 665 runs at an average of 95; this included 145 and six for nineteen against the Melbourne Cricket Club, the largest club in Melbourne whose team included many Test and first-class cricketers.

## Representative cricket

### Early career

Following his feats against it in 1899–1900, Armstrong was recruited for the next season by the Melbourne Cricket Club (MCC). For the next twenty years, on and off the pitch, Armstrong's fortunes were tied to the club, a leading cricketing light in Australia and a bastion of the city's rich and powerful. He scored his maiden first-class century, 118, against South Australia, facing the very fast and physically dangerous bowling of Ernie Jones, and by the end of the 1900–01 season he was a permanent member of the Victorian team.

The England cricket team, organised and captained by Archie MacLaren, toured Australia to compete for the Ashes in the summer of 1901–02. The English were considered a poor and undermanned team, but it surprised all by winning the first Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground by an innings and 124 runs. Before the second Test, Armstrong had an excellent all-round performance against New South Wales, dismissing Test players Victor Trumper and Syd Gregory, and then scoring 137 in reply. When the team for the Melbourne Test was announced, Armstrong was selected, making his début with Reggie Duff from New South Wales.

Armstrong made a steady start to Test cricket. Batting at No. 9 on a sticky wicket, he made four not out in the first innings, in an Australian total of 116. In reply, England could only score 61. With the wicket still treacherous, Australia rearranged their batting order to save the better batsmen until conditions improved. The two debutants, Duff and Armstrong, were positioned at 10 and 11, and shared a 120-run partnership for the last wicket, Duff scoring 104 and Armstrong 45 not out. Australia won the Test by 229 runs. Armstrong played in the remaining Tests in the series, narrowly heading the averages with 159 runs at an average of 53, and Australia went on to win comfortably by four matches to one.

Armstrong was selected as part of the Australian cricket team to tour England in 1902. He started the tour well, taking eight for 47 in the second innings against Nottinghamshire, his best bowling figures to that date. The first Test, at Edgbaston was rain-affected and the Australians were lucky to come away with a draw, being dismissed for 36 in their first innings. The rest of the close-fought series was followed with interest by the English public. The second Test at Lord's was rained off, and Australia won the third at Bramall Lane by 143 runs. The final two Tests were nail-biters—Australia winning the fourth at Old Trafford by only three runs and England earning a consolation victory in the fifth Test at the Oval by one wicket, when last-wicket pair George Hirst and Wilfred Rhodes eked out the final runs. Armstrong had a good tour, making 1,075 runs at 27.56 and taking 72  wickets at an average of 17.90, but the star for the Australians was Victor Trumper, who made 2,570 runs at an average of 48.49 including eleven centuries.

On the return trip to Australia, the touring team stopped in South Africa to play three Tests, the first between the two nations. In the second Test at Johannesburg, Armstrong scored 159, just over half the Australian score of 309 and carried his bat through the innings as Australia won the Test by 159 runs. Australia won the Test series two–nil. On return to Australia for the 1902–03 season, he made 580 runs at an average of 58 and 23 wickets at an average of just over 19. The highlights of his season included 145 against Queensland and a hat-trick against New South Wales.

Plum Warner's English team toured Australia in 1903–04, the first to do so under the auspices of the Marylebone Cricket Club. The strong English team defeated Australia three–two, retrieving the Ashes. Armstrong did not have a good series. He was tormented by Rhodes, who dismissed him eight times in ten meetings for Victoria and Australia that summer. As a result, he was dropped from the Australian XI after the Third Test.

Returning to club cricket, Armstrong found form, scoring 438 in only 455 minutes for Melbourne against University, from a total score of 699 for eight. In the 1904–05 season, Armstrong scored 460 runs at 57.5 for Victoria to secure selection for the 1905 tour of England.

### Consolidation and conflict

The 1905 Australians left for England, leaving behind the beginnings of a conflict between players and administrators over control of cricket that would poison the sport in Australia for the next ten years. While previous tours of England had been underwritten by the Melbourne Cricket Club and organised by the players, the new Australian Board of Control was asserting its right to control Australian cricket.

Armstrong, finding himself promoted to number five in the batting order, started the tour well with 112 against Nottinghamshire and 248 against Gentlemen of England at Lord's. In the first Test at Trent Bridge, Australia's lack of effective bowling options had Armstrong forced to bowl wide outside the leg stump in an early form of leg theory bowling to prevent the England batsmen from scoring quickly. Bumbling and taciturn, Armstrong maintained an accurate line and length, and put a strangle on both England's run-scoring and the crowd's entertainment. It was a recurrent pattern for the rest of the series, and lead to what was seen by spectators and the press as dull cricket. Batsmen like the imperial Archie MacLaren would kick the ball away contemptuously, but lissome Johnny Tyldesley proved that runs could still made if a batsman employed more enterprise. Hopping away to leg to make room for himself, Tyldesley cut and drove the leg-spinner to great effect in a strategy later used by Don Bradman against the bodyline menace.

Armstrong's tactics were ultimately futile, a Stanley Jackson-inspired England winning the series by two Tests to none. For the season, he scored 1,902 runs at an average of fifty. Regarding his batting, Wisden Cricketers' Almanack said, "The great batsman of the eleven was Armstrong. In form nearly all through the tour, he struck the happy medium, being brilliant without recklessness." The highlight of his tour was a triple century (303 not out) at the Recreation Ground in Bath against Somerset.

When the team returned to Australia, the rift between the players and the Board of Control widened. The dispute saw the English postpone their tour, scheduled for 1906–07. In the midst of all this turmoil, Armstrong continued to impress: on tour with Melbourne Cricket Club in New Zealand, he was described by that country's Herald newspaper as a "team almost in himself". He made 868 runs at an average of 124 to complement his 83 wickets at under ten. He was elected captain of Victoria by his teammates for the match against New South Wales, commencing on New Year's Eve, responding with six for 68 with the ball and then scoring 168 in the second innings as part of a sturdy rearguard effort.

Armstrong found employment with the Department of Home Affairs and, as a result, declared himself unavailable for the next match against South Australia. He was mortified when he found that he had been included in the team and that the Victorian Cricket Association (VCA) had approached his employer to ask for leave on his behalf, despite his having explicitly instructed the VCA secretary otherwise. Armstrong refused to play and was called to face a disciplinary hearing at the Young and Jackson Hotel. Rightly indignant, he was left unpunished.

The scheduled tour postponed from the previous season kicked off with the arrival of an English team weakened by the withdrawals of a number of leading players. The first Test saw an Australian victory, Armstrong bowling 53 overs and taking four for 92. More squabbling, this time over expenses, followed between Armstrong and the VCA, and the former withdrew from the Boxing Day match against New South Wales. Armstrong sought a £1 per diem, but the VCA held fast at ten shillings. It then mounted a campaign in the Melbourne press, attempting to portray Armstrong as avaricious and once again called him to front a disciplinary commission. Following threats of suspension, Armstrong was forced to apologise to the VCA. The fracas did not affect his form, however: the second Test, starting on New Year's Day, saw Armstrong score 31 and 77 and take five wickets for 89. Despite his efforts, England won a hard-fought Test by one wicket.

Australia took the third Test in Adelaide, and a patient 133 in 289 minutes from Armstrong in the fourth saw Australia clinch the series and win back the Ashes. The margin was four–one, but both teams were criticised by reporters for slow scoring and negative cricket.

Once again, the selection and management of the Australian team to tour England in 1909 caused friction between leading players and the Board of Control. Clem Hill, unwilling to tour on the terms offered by the Board, withdrew his name from consideration. Regardless, the tour was a success, both for the Australians, who won the series two-one, and for Armstrong, who made 1,451 runs at an average of just under 44 and took 133 wickets at an average of 16.40 Wisden Cricketers' Almanack described his role in the tour as "to keep the side together by means of his impregnable defence, and he did exactly what was required, only on rare occasions giving free play to his hitting power. When he likes to let himself loose there is no harder driver in the world".

Armstrong, along with Monty Noble, Tibby Cotter and Bert Hopkins returned home via Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), Penang and Singapore, where they were lavishly entertained and comfortably billeted by the elite of the Colony. Their hosts took the cricketers on a trip to the British protectorate of Perak for a shooting expedition where Armstrong contracted malaria. He would suffer relapses throughout the rest of his life.

### Rebellion

Armstrong was appointed captain of an Australian side that toured New Zealand from February to April 1910, partly as recognition of his accomplishments and partly due to the unavailability of other candidates, such as Trumper. Suspicions still ran high between the Board and the players and Trumper, tiring of what he perceived as persecution, retired from first-class cricket. The tour did not include any Test matches, although a match was played against a representative New Zealand team. Australia won every game, save a draw against Canterbury. Armstrong, more diplomatic as captain than some commenters had been expecting, turned down a lucrative offer to coach the Auckland team.

The Melbourne Cricket Club found Armstrong a job as "pavilion clerk". His duties were broadly defined in order to allow him to meet his representative cricket obligations. These included matches against the touring South Africans, scheduled to play five Tests in 1910–11. The first Test saw Australia win by an innings and 114 runs thanks mainly to an innings on 191 from Hill and eight wickets to Bill Whitty. Armstrong nearly missed the second Test in Melbourne with a case of mumps. He recovered, and although still unwell managed to score 75 and take 4–134 from 48 overs. In the fourth Test, Armstrong compiled another century, 132 including a partnership of 154 with Hill. Australia won the series comfortably, winning four of the five Test matches with their only loss at Adelaide by 38 runs. Returning to cricket after his self-imposed exile, Victor Trumper was the leading player for the Australians during the series scoring 661 runs at an average of 94.

The English team returned to Australia the following season to compete for the Ashes with Pelham Warner once again captain of a very strong English team that included bowlers Sydney Barnes and Frank Foster. Warner suffered from an illness early in the tour and handed the captaincy to Johnny Douglas. After losing the first Test, England won the remaining four Tests comfortably. In the second Test at Melbourne, Armstrong played one of his best Test innings. Facing exceptional bowling from Foster and Barnes, he made a nerveless 90, including 14 boundaries, before being dismissed by Foster.

While this series took place, the Board of Control made plans to usurp the commonly accepted rights of the players to appoint a manager when touring England. The hostility between the players and the board saw a fist fight break out between Clem Hill and Peter McAlister at a selection meeting. When the Board announced that George Crouch would be manager of the Australian team for the 1912 Triangular Tournament in England, rather than the player's choice, Frank Laver, outright rebellion ensued. Armstrong, Hill and Trumper, along with Hanson Carter, Tibby Cotter and Vernon Ransford (known as the "Big Six") announced that they would be unavailable to join the touring party. The team, under the captaincy of Syd Gregory, left without these players. The tour was not a success on any front: the Australians winning only eight games and losing nine in a wet season and Crouch on return to Australia reported to the Board that "some of the players had conducted themselves so badly in England as to lead to the team being socially ostracised."

International cricket was placed on hold as a result of the outbreak of the Great War. Armstrong had been named captain of the Australian team to tour South Africa in 1914–15, however the tour was unable to take place. Armstrong chose not to enlist in the military during the war and kept his own counsel on the subject. He continued to work and play cricket for Melbourne Cricket Club, participating in the occasional fund-raising fixture.

### Captain

When international cricket resumed after the Great War, Armstrong, now over forty years of age, was appointed captain of a strong Australian team boosted by the inclusion of players such as Jack Gregory and Herbie Collins who had starred in the Australian Imperial Forces cricket team. Armstrong was much older than many of his teammates and was the subject of some awe; Gregory describing him as "my ideal cricketer". The touring English team, captained once again by Johnny Douglas was no match for the Australians, who won all five Tests in the 1920–21 series, completing the first and only Ashes whitewash for 86 years on 1 March. Armstrong was masterful throughout the Test series. He scored 474 runs at an average of over 77 including three centuries; 158 in Sydney, 121 in Adelaide and 123 not out in Melbourne. Before going out to bat in the second innings at Sydney, he was seen, "padded up, [drinking] whisky with his mates at the members' bar".

Armstrong remained unpopular with the Board of Control. Despite Armstrong's triumphs, it was reported that he was only appointed captain of the 1921 Australian team to tour England by "the narrowest possible margin". On the voyage to England, Armstrong attempted to lose some weight by spending some time each day in the stokehold of the ship. On arrival, however, he weighed in 4 pounds (2 kg) heavier. Against English teams badly affected by the Great War, the Australians dominated the series. Armstrong marshalled his troops well, utilising Gregory and Ted McDonald to devastating effect. Australia won the first Test in two days, the second Test by lunch on the third day and the third Test and the Ashes by 5.00 pm on the third day. Throughout the tour, Armstrong fought a series of running battles against the Board appointed manager, Syd Smith, on behalf of his men. Smith, looking to cut overheads, had suggested boarding with wealthy cricket devotees; Armstrong dismissed the idea.

The fourth Test at Old Trafford was famous for two events, both involving Armstrong. The first day's play was washed out and England commenced their innings the following day, the match now a two-day affair. Lionel Tennyson, the English captain, declared his innings closed with twenty minutes of play left in the day. The Australian wicket-keeper, Sammy Carter pointed out to Armstrong that a declaration at that time in a two-day match was against the laws of cricket as they stood at that time. Armstrong protested to the umpires and England were forced to continue batting. In the commotion, Armstrong managed to bowl two overs in succession, an action also against the laws of cricket.

By the fifth Test, the Australian team was in sight of being the first Australian team to remain unbeaten throughout a tour of England. Once again, much of the first day was lost to rain. Determined not to lose, Armstrong attempted to delay commencement after the rain and was heckled by English supporters. He told his three main bowlers, "I won't ask you not to get a man out, but as long as Mead (a notoriously slow scoring batsman) remains at the wicket we can't be beaten". In the last three hours of the Test, Armstrong decided to rest his key bowlers and allowed his part-time bowlers to rotate as they pleased and fielders to configure themselves. During this time, Armstrong picked up a newspaper that had been blown across the field and began to read. When asked about this later, Armstrong was said to have replied, "I wanted to see who we were playing", although this is claimed to be apocryphal. The Australians drew the Test and won the series three–nil, however they could not maintain their unbeaten record, losing by 28 runs to an English XI at Eastbourne and again to C. I. Thornton's XI at Scarborough.

Despite the two losses, the tour was a triumph for Armstrong. Personally, he achieved the 1,000 runs and 100 wickets milestone for the third time in an English summer. About his captaincy, former rival Frank Foster said, "I honestly think that Australia have got to thank one man, one man only for their success. That man is Warwick Armstrong, probably one of the best captains ever sent to England from Australia". On return to Australia, Armstrong was greeted by large enthusiastic crowds and acclaimed at many public receptions. At one reception, he was presented with a £2,500 cheque by the Prime Minister of Australia Billy Hughes.

> If ever there was a man singled out as a king of sport it was Mr. Armstrong, who had gone out to give the people of England a chance to regain the Ashes and who had returned, like Imperial Caesar, who came, saw and conquered.

## Outside cricket

The 1921 tour was Armstrong's swan song in first-class cricket. On the journey back to Australia, he suffered a relapse of the malaria that had plagued him since his earlier visit to Malaya. This kept him from taking part in any of the matches in South Africa, allowing Herbie Collins to captain Australia for the first time. Armstrong resigned from his job with Melbourne Cricket Club and drawing on contacts he had made while on tour took a role as an agent for Dawson's Scotch Whisky. He remained in the liquor trade until his retirement in 1946. Armstrong also applied his cricket background acting as a cricket journalist for the Sydney Evening News. His copy was promoted as "frank and fearless" and was generally contemptuous of much of the cricket and cricketers he saw, especially of what he saw as dull cricket.

In 1922 he wrote a primer on cricket titled The Art of Cricket published by Methuen & Co, London.

In July 1913 he married Aileen O'Donnell, the daughter of a wealthy Irish Australian pastoralist with large land holdings in the Riverina region of New South Wales. The couple met while Armstrong was representing the Melbourne Cricket Club in a match against a Wagga Wagga XV. Armstrong and his new wife settled in Melbourne, moving to the Sydney suburb of Edgecliff for business reasons in 1935. Aileen died of a thrombosis in 1940. Armstrong, following illness that saw him lose much of the weight that he was known for, died on 13 July 1947, leaving an estate to the value of £90,000. His funeral was held at St Joseph's Catholic Church in Edgecliff and proceeded to the South Head Cemetery. He was survived by his son, Warwick Geoffrey.

Armstrong was an all-round sportsman, playing Australian rules football in the winter for South Melbourne in the Victorian Football League (VFL), the premier competition in the state, from 1898 to 1900. A slim utility, he played 16 games for the club, scoring 18 goals. He played in South Melbourne's losing 1899 VFL Grand Final team defeated by Fitzroy by one point.

## Style and personality

Although slim as a young man, Armstrong grew into a big man, weighing 133 kilograms (293 lb) and being 190 centimetres (6 foot 3 inches) tall. As a result, he acquired the nickname "The Big Ship". His oversize shirt, measuring 26 centimetres (10 in) by 85 centimetres (33 in) and his shoes, 32 centimetres (13 in) long by 18 centimetres (7 in) wide are on display at the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame. A story told of Armstrong had a young boy following him around at a tour match in Southampton. Armstrong, thinking it a manifestation of hero worship, offered to sign the boy's autograph book. The boy turned to Armstrong and said, "Please, sir, you are the only bit of decent shade in the place."

As a batsman, Armstrong was not a stylist. The Times, in describing Armstrong's batting after he scored his maiden century against Sussex in 1902 said, "Mr. Armstrong's methods were not attractive".

> His pose at the wickets gives an impression of awkwardness which is not dispelled when he shapes to play the ball and his strokeplay is essentially laboured ... His methods, however, are remarkably effective; they show a most admirable blend of aggression and caution, backed by the right temperament. His defence is very sound, watchful and painstaking, his strokeplay is limited in its variety, but very sound in its execution.

Armstrong was tireless as a leg break bowler and was known for his ability to land the ball on any point of the pitch he liked. His action imparted as much topspin as leg spin, making it difficult for batsman to detect his "straight-breaks". Early in his career, he bowled negative leg theory but later used his accuracy to great effect, bowling an over or two of leg breaks and then the straight one in the hope of bowling the batsman or receiving a leg before wicket dismissal. His action consisted of an easy amble and a gentle arc and was described in the Sporting Life as "rather like a fat uncle, not altogether unlike a fat aunt." It was effective, however, with the Daily Telegraph stating after the first Test in 1921, "there is not a single batsman in England who faces with any appearance of confidence his innocuous slows."

Armstrong was renowned for his gamesmanship and was willing to push the boundaries of what was considered acceptable behaviour in order to obtain an advantage for his team. In 1909, the English all-rounder Frank Woolley was making his Test début against the Australians at the Oval. Taking advantage of a rule that allowed bowlers to bowl trial balls or "looseners", Armstrong kept Woolley waiting nervously for more than fifteen minutes while he bowled trial balls alongside the pitch. In a club game against St Kilda, Armstrong claimed a catch in the slips, only to have the umpire refuse the dismissal. It was the last ball of the over and as the field changed, Armstrong brusquely inquired why this was so. Informed that the ball had struck the batsman's pads, Armstrong then appealed for a leg before wicket dismissal, which the umpire then upheld.

Armstrong was not a "walker"; he believed in waiting for the umpire to make a decision, once telling the English cricketer Arthur Gilligan, "The more you play this game, the more you will find out that you will be given out many times when you are not out and vice versa". English professional cricketers took a dim view of Armstrong's approach to the game. Jack Hobbs, describing one instance said,

> The chief offender was Warwick Armstrong, who got very nasty and unsportsmanlike, refusing to accept the umpire's decision. That upset me. I did not know if I was standing on my head or my heels with the consequence that two balls later I let one go, never even attempting to play it; and it bowled me. I still bear this incident in mind against Armstrong.

Australian cricketer (1879–1947)

Australian Cricket Hall of Fame inductees

Australian Rules footballers: place kick exponents

Australian rules footballers from Melbourne