Reply #18: I assume you're taking issue with the use of 'illegals'

[Igel]

as a noun.

"Illegal", using the adjective as a noun, is dubbed substantivization (by some; others have other names for it: conversion, coercion ... you picks your theory, you gets your terminology). Sometimes we need a verbal context to help in the coercion: "Do you like the red or blue jelly beans?" "I like the reds." Sometimes the location = context. I can go into a fast food joint and ask the clerk for a "hot and spicy" or for "one black and two with sugar" and get the appropriate chicken sandwich or coffees (or get something rather different if I'm in a strip joint and slipping the manager money). Sometimes the adjective comes to be considered a full-fledged noun: e.g. a jockey's silks, a musician's blacks. Sometimes the context is so obvious it doesn't need stating. "I like strawberry, but not vanilla." I think most people will understand 'ice cream' (maybe milkshake). "Do you prefer blondes or brunettes?" is usually clear. But presumably that's not the real issue; the real issue isn't a nicety of English morphology, but of how we should parse 'illegal immigrant'.

An "illegal person" would be a person who's existence or presence was illegal, rather like "an illegal gun" or "illegal milk". It's assigning an attribute to a concrete noun. I guess it's a possible phrase, "illegal person", but I have trouble with finding a suitable context. Maybe if we had a world in which cloning was easily doable, but quite illegal, we could have an 'illegal person'.

In "illegal migrant" (or immigrant or emigrant, or even 'entrant' or 'participant') we're not assigning an attribute to a concrete noun, so possible contexts are relatively easy to find. The "migrant" isn't illegal in the same sense as a "illegal gun" is, it's not the 'noun part' of 'migrant' that's being assigned a property. Formally, 'illegal' may look and act like an adjective, but can't be construed as an adjective; semantically it's an adverb, modifying the underlying (or implicit) action. An "immigrant" is "a person who has immigrated". But an "illegal immigrant" isn't "an illegal person who has immigrated", but "a person who has illegally immigrated". It's called a bracketing paradox: on the surface, it looks like <[illegal> + ] is the grammar, but semantically the needed derivation is <[illegal + immigr-(ate)> + -ant]. Sometimes 'unpacking' the phrase aides in figuring out how you're misparsing it; sometimes you have to look at the entire paradigm to sort out where the ambiguities can exist, and common sense to see how to understand a construction. The ambiguities of English morphology allow the misparsing, but nothing in English grammar forces the misparsing; some people simply don't understand that they don't need to misparse, or they find some advantage in misparsing.


Grice taught that one fundamental aspect of communication in English-language discourse was "the cooperative principle". Sadly, communication has faltered and frayed; that doesn't mean Grice was wrong, if anything, he's been shown right.