Talk:accused

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Rfv-sense: adjective. I don't think this meets the tests for adjective *"become accused", *"very accused", *"more accused than". Entry as legal noun seems correct. DCDuring TALK 10:27, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

• Er...well it is an adjective, and there are many cites for "accused party" or "accused persons" etc. The real question is whether this is actually a real noun: I would say it's just the adjective used substantively. You can't say "an accused" or "some accuseds", so I think it's just like "the quick and the dead" and other similar constructions where we're dealing with a substantive adjective. Ƿidsiþ 11:27, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

  I agree with Widsith's conclusion and reasoning. --EncycloPetey 17:53, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

• Any past participle might have attributive use as an adjective, just as any p`roper noun can be used as a common noun, any noun can be used attributively, and any -ing form can be used as noun and adjective. If we would like to lexicalize grammatical properties, then we should decide to do so. If our goal is to create a tool for dumb machine translations, this would probably be appropriate. If our goal is to serve humans or smarter machines, not so much. DCDuring TALK 18:55, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree with Widsith and EP. BTW, google books:"feel|feels|feeling|felt very accused" gets five hits, of which four do seem to be using accused as an adjective. (The fifth has a "by"-phrase; I think the writer is incompetently blending the adjective use with the passive-voice use.) I don't generally like to cite a sense entirely from one b.g.c. search, since that paints a misleading picture (I don't want to give the impression that the sense is always used in one very specific way), but if we had to, we could.
That said, it's interesting that "very much accused" is usually preferred over "very accused"; that's not usually true of adjectives. I'm not sure if it warrants a usage note or something.
—Ruakh_TALK 18:05, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

I look forward to the cites. DCDuring TALK 18:55, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

I've added a few different cites that I think demonstrate adjectivality. Please take a look. (BTW, happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Or at least, everyone who celebrates it. Happy Thursday, everyone else! Or at least, everyone else for whom it's still Thursday …) —Ruakh_TALK 23:24, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Just barely still Thanksgiving here. Thanks and the same to you.

Cited. The cites look fine. I don't know what the usage note would say. We no longer have a context tag for "uncommon", which was offered as an alternative: less rare than "rare". I'm not sure that most users will register or care about the difference between a true adjective and the past participle being used only as an attributive adjective, let alone a relatively low frequency of true adjective use. Only RHU and Websters 1913 show this as an adjective. I think we are misleading readers my treating this as distinct from the past participle, notwithstanding the apparently valid citations. DCDuring TALK 04:45, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

RFV passed. —Ruakh_TALK 01:17, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

By the way, an accused is easily citable. Just google "an accused claimed" and you get thousands of perfectly acceptable quotations.