Is there a word or term similar gerund to describe using an adjective as a noun? I can only think of examples like: hottie, sweetie, or cutie. Is this simply slang or colloquialism?
Are there other languages that use a grammatically correct advectival (???) noun?
I believe the only term for that would just be the adjectival form. I know that when you forgo using a noun and its descriptive adjective and instead simply use the adjective that describes that noun (i.e. “Few were entertained by his smart ass remarks.” vs. “Few people were entertained by his smart ass remarks.”) the adjective is called a substantive adjective. In the cases you described, though, you are just taking the adjective form of the noun. There could be a concise word for it, though. Perhaps I should shut my hole and let some more learned grammarian come along and answer this.
This particular words were created by affixing: adding a suffix or a prefix to a word to create a brand new (but usually related) word. Just add the suffix -ie to the adjectives “hot,” “sweet,” and “cute,” and you get the nouns “hottie,” “sweetie,” and “cutie.” Affixing often changes the part of speech, as in these words. Another example would be that adding the suffix -like to the noun “war” creates the adjective “warlike.”
It is possible to just start using a word as a different part of speech without changing it. For example, “impact” used to only be a noun, but it is now also used as a verb. There is no particular term for this, except for “changing the part of speech.” Like affixing, it’s a pretty common way of getting new words.
Bill Watterson called that “verbing”, but I’m pretty sure he coined the term.
Heh. Yeah, but we’d also need words like “adjectiving” (e.g. “woman”: noun to adjective) and “nouning” (e.g. “whirl”: verb to noun).
Sure there is. It’s zero-derivation. It’s possible (and common) in many languages, but other languages with more complex inflectional morphology (like the Romance languages, for instance) don’t permit it because verbs or nouns require special endings.
WRT the OP, I have always heard this form called a “diminutive.” They seem fairly well documented in other languages, but Google refused to cooperate in helping me find a cite pertaining to English.
AFAIK a “diminutive” in grammar is taking “Jim” and calling him “Jimmy,” or taking “cigar” and getting “cigarette.” This use is a lot more prevalent in some other languages than in English.
As for doing in romance languages, Excalibre, I do it all the time in Spanish when I can’t think of the word. Sometimes I get a smile, sometimes people scratch their heads, and sometimes they really understand me!
The general term for replacing a conventional word with one that is associated with it (regardless of part of speech) is metonymy. E.g.
“He perished in her briny blue,” (where “her briny blue” might mean a nation’s seas" or perhaps a woman’s teary eyes)
There are specific types of metonymy. e.g. Synecdoche is the substitution of a part for the whole (“hand” for “sailor”), the specific for the general (“Our new director is a Benedict Arnold”), a substance for an object (“iron” for a gun, “steel” for a blade, “wood” for a baseball bat) etc – and vice versa (“law” for a policeman). However, a given example of metonymy may argued as belonging more than one category, either simultaneously, due to its construction or perhaps ambiguously, due to each reader’s exact interpretation of how the metaphor was constructed (e.g. “blue” in the “briny blue” example may be seen as an adjective or noun --I favor the former.)
Antonomasia or transferred epithets are among the common ways of using an adjective as a noun. “All hail the cute, the bubbly, the vivacious!” Though we are accustomed to thinking of an ‘epithet’ as a name or insult, any descriptive adjective is also an epithet: Alexander the Great, rosy-fingered dawn, thumb-sucking tots. Antonomasia is so common that we don’t notice it: “We must make allowances for the left-handed” (or the oppressed, depressed, steam-pressed, obsessed, and excess). It often spawn new word forms in general use: while “the steam-pressed” is unusual enough to stand out as an antonomasic adjective, commoner usages, like “the left handed”, “the oppressed” or “the downtrodden” may find places in a dictionary as nouns.
I thought a diminutive referred to a noun by definition. A nounette if you will.
Epithet seems especially appropriate to ‘sweetie’ etc. But, while terms like metonym describe what is happening to the word-- the type of wordplay involved-- I have to wonder if terms like ‘dear’ and ‘sweetest’ aren’t just common slang.