Okay, I have my own opinion, but I’m interested in seeing what the experts have to say. What are mouthful and handful? Are they nouns, adjectives or adverbs?
Um, where’s the “opinion” here? They’re nouns.
Uh, huh. Nouns.
These things be nouns.
The experts have compiled dictionaries. You would do well to consult one. And with no disrespect, please be aware that neither your nor anyone else’s opinion is relevant here. As Cecil said, we don’t take votes on the facts.
And yes, they’re both nouns.
How much detail, confusion do you want here tygerbryght ?
Could your confusion be that they are ‘quantifiers’ like gallon, mile etc.
A mile of dirt road.
A handful of dust.
If you want you could say they are ‘countable nouns’ - they can have a plural or a singular form and are used with ‘many’ rather than ‘much’.
Compound nouns if you want. English allows us to make word combinations out of two words, often nouns, such as ‘fire’ and ‘engine’ - taken separately each word has a meaning, out them together and a new meaning is created with the first noun qualifying the second (in other words, acting like an adjective).
eg a fire-engine is very different from an engine fire.
The same thing can be done with noun adjective combinations. The resultant word is a noun. If they are used often enough together they become hyphanated then amalgamated into a single word as has happened with your examples. In this phrase ‘bowl’ is a noun and ‘full’ an adjective,
A bowl full of soup.
In this phrase there is no adjective
A forkful of spaghetti.
Happy ?
Well, actually “A” is adjectival in function, even though the only modifying it does is to specify indefiniteness: “a (any) forkful of spaghetti, as opposed to the (that specific) forkful of spaghetti.” The articles are a special class of adjectives.
It might help to note that one can also omit the substance. “I have a handful”, or “that’s a mouthful”. Since “handful” and “mouthful” are not directly modifying anything here, it should be clear that they’re not adjectives.
Yes but if we are labelling parts of speech it is an article (the article in fact ;)) and I didn’t want to further muddy the waters.
I would put “forkful” and “handful” into the category of categorical or classifier nouns.
I wonder if the confusion on the part of the OP is because lots of adjectives end in -ful - “joyful”, “gleeful”, “tearful” etc. Of course, by the same reasoning one would assume “elderly” to be an adverb 
Oh I like that - she walked elderly across the room 
:smack:
Ah, well. 
I guess I shoulda given a bunch of examples.
My problem relates to the fact that they can be used as adjectives, as noted by Cat Jones in post #6. And to the fact that plurals of words of this type are formed differently from regular nouns, i.e., mouthsful and handsful, etc.
I tend to regard them as adjectives masquerading as nouns.
BTW, Gary T, I looked at my bookmark file, and stopped counting links for dictionaries at 10 (not counting bilingual ones, thesauri, or other similar reference works).
The point of my question? English is, as it has always been, a language busily evolving. I don’t like some of the changes, but that doesn’t make them less real. And I love to play with words (as do a significant number of other Dopers). So I wanted to see if anyone else here was looking through the same lens I was.
Those aren’t adjectives.
a: article
handful: noun
of: preposition
dust: noun
To use the word as an adjective, it’d be something like “a handful dust”, which is gramatically incorrect. Handful is comparable to words like bunch, heap, gallon, and amount. A heap (of garbage), a bunch (of bananas), and an amount (of cash) are all nouns.
They can be, but they aren’t always. Merriam-Webster lists both handfuls and handsful (I prefer the former), but doesn’t list mouthsful at all - only mouthfuls.
I have a nitpick here…
I am not an expert on this, but I doubt that anyone has proposed, as you do, that articles are a type of adjective (at least as far as English goes).
It is theoretically advantageous not to subsume the class of articles (or more generally, “determiners”) into the class of words we call “adjectives”.
To understand why this is so, consider the following (highly oversimplified) rule for generating noun phrases in English:
(Det) Adj* Noun
(Parentheses indicate optionality, and the star indicates optionality and indefinite repetition.)
Then we specify:
Det: a, the, some, my, your, …
Adj: big, furry, …
Noun: dog, cat, …
Our rule will now license things like “a small dog”, “a big, furry dog”, “big, big, big cats”, and also rule out countless ungrammatical constructions such as “the the dog”, “furry the a cat”, etc.
And importantly, this rule works because we make a distinction between “determiner” and “adjective”: in a noun phrase, a determiner can appear at most once at the beginning, followed by any number of adjectives.
I think Mr2001 has pretty much said what I’d wanted to say in reply to your last post Tygerbryght.
Just to add tho’ that most of the changes taking place in contemporary English fall into two categories - both resulting from a ‘desire’ to be more concise.
Nouns being used as verbs.
“I sent him an e-mail” simplifies to “I e-mailed him”.
(As Calvin & Hobbes said “Verbing wierds language” 
)
Dropping the noun from common adjective/noun combinations, effectively turning the adjective into a noun.
“A microwave oven” is usually now just “a microwave”.
Who says “I gave him my mobile phone number.”? these days it’s just “… my mobile number.”. (US dopers replace mobile with cell!)
As for evolution, in the singular form at least, both ‘handful’ and ‘mouthful’ appear in Shakespeare.
(Now, do I dare continue this ? adding an ‘s’ to the first element in compound phrases like these is usual only when the two elements have not been blended into a single word - “courts martial” & “Lords Mayor” but not “firesengine”.
- To me* there is a difference between the two plural forms mentioned which might explain why ‘mouthsful’ didn’t appear in an earlier search.
The instinctive image I have in my mind is that ‘two handfuls’ refers to two times a single handful. “She took two handfuls of crisps”. I see a single hand being filled twice, it sounds correct and natural with any number - five handfuls, ten handfuls etc.
Whereas ‘handsful’ makes me think of “Can’t you see I’ve got my hands full ?” and I have an image of two hands being involved rather than just the one. I could imagine a phrase like “the thirsty soldiers dropped their guns and scooped up handsful of water”.
That was just an idea - I’m not claiming any factual accuracy.)
[sidebar] I’d like to add, too, that if you can’t hold it in your hand, it isn’t a handful.
I see this all the time:
"A handful of passengers escaped unharmed … "
Unless you’re the Jolly Green Giant, that ain’t possible. [/sidebar]
Naw, articles can be broadly described as a special type of adjective and indeed what I was taught by an English teacher growing up. Polycarp is hardly the first to suggest this. Google “article” and “type of adjective” and you’ll see this is the case.
Okay, fair enough…
When I said no one had proposed this, I should have clarified that I meant no one in a peer-reviewed linguistics paper. There are lots of wild misconceptions about grammar floating around on the Internet, and among English teachers.
Didn’t my argument for the distinction make any sense?
There is a confusion here between category and function. “Adjective” is a label for a category of words. I’ve tried to show why this is a useful label to have, and why it needs to exclude determiners. In contrast, the functional term encompassing what adjectives and determiners serve as when preceding a noun is “adnominal modifier”.
To draw a crude analogy, a whale is not a type of fish, because “fish” is a biological category, not simply a functional label for things that swim underwater.