Comments
Some two-word phrases follow this pattern. Nouns derived from phrasal verbs like the following are written solid or hyphenated: hand out, drop out, hand over, crack down, follow through, come back.
In some cases the spelling changes when the accent moves to another syllable, as in the following verb/noun pairs:
- envelop, envelope
- unite, unit
In British English, annexe is the noun from the verb annex.
Pronunciations vary geographically. Some words here may belong on this list according to pronunciations prevailing in some regions, but not according to those in others. Some speakers, for example, would consider display as one of these words. For some other speakers, however, address carries stress on the final syllable in both the noun and the verb. There is a dialect in the United States referred to informally by linguists as P/U or police/umbrella because many nouns are stressed on the first syllable; including police, umbrella, and many verb-derived nouns. Some dialects of Scottish English have this in "police".
Some derived nouns are used only in restricted senses; often there is a more generic noun not identical in spelling to the verb. For instance, to combine is to put together, whereas a combine may be a farm machine or a railway car; the generic noun is combination. Perhaps transpose is used as a noun only by mathematicians; the transpose of a matrix is the result of the process of transposition of the matrix; the two-syllable noun and the four-syllable noun differ in meaning in that one is the result and the other is the process. Similar remarks apply to transform; the process is transformation, the result of the process is the transform, as in Laplace transform, Fourier transform, etc.
In the case of the word protest, as a noun it has the stress on the first syllable, but as a verb its meaning depends on stress: with the stress on the second syllable it means to raise a protest; on the first it means to participate in a protest. This appears to result from the derived noun being verbed.
Entrance is also a noun when stressed on the first syllable and a verb when on the second, but that is not a true example since the words are unrelated homographs.
Read more about this topic: Initial-stress-derived Noun
Famous quotes containing the word comments:
“Rather would I have the love songs of romantic ages, rather Don Juan and Madame Venus, rather an elopement by ladder and rope on a moonlight night, followed by the father’s curse, mother’s moans, and the moral comments of neighbors, than correctness and propriety measured by yardsticks.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“My note to you I certainly did not expect to see in print; yet I have not been much shocked by the newspaper comments upon it. Those comments constitute a fair specimen of what has occurred to me through life. I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)