Reply to post: Re: Excuse my lack of understanding ...

Word boffins back Rimini Street in Oracle row: 'Full' in 'full costs' is a 'delexicalised adjective'

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Excuse my lack of understanding ...

However, 'full time' and 'full house' are compound nouns.

They can be, but those are not the only valid parses of those phrases found in actual usage.

The house in a full house is not a dwelling, unless you are talking about a massive party in someone's home.

It most certainly might be a dwelling. Among my speech community, I'd say the use of "full house" to describe a dwelling with many people in it is far more common than, say, the poker term.

Similarly, full time is not an overflowing collection of time, but a set phrase.

By "set phrase" I suppose you mean an idiom (or a collocation, but since collocation is purely a statistical description, calling "full time" one doesn't support your argument). Again, "full time" may be used idiomatically (though in US English it's more often written as a compound than as a phrase), but it can also be used as a normal noun phrase. It might be a poor example for purposes of their argument, but it's not strictly incorrect.

'Full moon' is literally used as an example of a compound noun in this article , for example.

So what? Even when considered a compound noun rather than a separable noun phrase (a dubious distinction, frankly), their argument about it holds. In "full moon", "full" defers to the unmodified meaning of "moon".

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