Definitions
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective rhetoric, philosophy Negating, denying, or casting doubt on the applicability of its
modificand . - noun rhetoric, philosophy An alienans adjective.
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
From Latin aliēnāns, present active particple of aliēnō ("make something another's"), from aliēnus ("another's, foreign").
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Examples
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This is highly plausible but not quite obvious, since as Barry Miller (1996, Ch. 5) argues, ˜perfect™ might be an alienans adjective.
Divine Simplicity Vallicella, William F. 2006
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Thus ˜decoy™ in ˜decoy duck™ is an alienans adjective: from the fact that a thing is a decoy duck one cannot infer that it is a duck in the way in which one can infer from the fact that a thing is a male duck that it is a duck.
Divine Simplicity Vallicella, William F. 2006
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An alienans adjective is one that shifts, alters, alienates, the sense of the noun that it modifies.
Divine Simplicity Vallicella, William F. 2006
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