Adverbial adjective of the month
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Or maybe "adverbial noun"? Or "adverbial verb"? Anyhow, "Long-closed Calif. mountain route surprise reopens after years", SFGate 9/2/2025:
A long-shuttered stretch of highway that cuts straight through Angeles National Forest above Los Angeles has finally reopened.
A roughly 10-mile stretch of Angeles Crest Highway, which runs roughly east-west through the national forest for over 60 miles from the wealthy suburb of La Cañada Flintridge to the small mountain town of Wrightwood, reopened with little notice on Friday after being closed for several years. Before the surprise return on Friday, the portion of the two-lane highway had been closed since the winter of 2022-2023, when “relentless storms” collapsed roadways, caused rockslides and damaged retaining walls, according to Caltrans.
The Wiktionary entry for surprise offers Noun, Verb, and Interjection sub-entries, but no Adjective or Adverb examples. It's normal for nouns to be used as nominal modifiers, but verbal modification by a noun is much rarer.
Comment from Chas Belov, who emailed the quote and link:
I was surprised to see the following on the SFGate website, a news website run by the San Francisco Chronicle (although separate staff from the newspaper), specifically the phrase "surprise reopens." I realize it's headlinese, but still…
I don't have time this morning to find the relevant sections the Cambridge Grammar or other sources, assuming that such sections exist. And no analogous examples come to mind, though readers will no doubt oblige.
The obligatory screen shot:
Update — CuConnacht in the comments suggests that "It reads to me as a noun used as an adjective used as an adverb. That is, I think that "surprise reopening" is somewhere in the background." That makes sense — but the pattern is not a general one, so that a "surprise discovery of X by Y" would probably not be headlined as "Y surprise discovers X". And someone's surprise appearance would probably not be described by saying that they "surprise appeared".
wgj said,
September 3, 2025 @ 5:09 am
Is "surprise" a noun used as adverb, or a verb used as adverb here? Or could it even be interpreted both ways, possibly with slightly different meanings?
CuConnacht said,
September 3, 2025 @ 5:44 am
It reads to me as a noun used as an adjective used as an adverb. That is, I think that "surprise reopening" is somewhere in the background.
J.W. Brewer said,
September 3, 2025 @ 7:03 am
I feel like a hyphenated "surprise-reopens" would be more cromulent. I agree that "surprise discovers" would be odder, and I wonder if the fact that "surprise reopens" is intransitive somehow makes it not quite so weird? Another distinction, which may or may not be relevant, is that in the discovery context, the discoverer is presumably the one (or at least among those) surprised, whereas in the reopening context the reopener is presumably not himself/herself surprised even if the general public is.
Duncan said,
September 3, 2025 @ 7:55 am
I initially garden-pathed the headline as mountain-route-surprise (noun), expecting say a restaurant review of a newly reopened eatery hidden away on a mountain route.
As a result, while reading the body quote, up until "Before the surprise return" triggered a reparse, I kept waiting for the introduction of this cozy eatery hidden away on this apparently also newly reopened mountain route (having not reparsed yet), as pictured in my mind's eye. I must be hungry as I could sure see the restaurant critic, and therefore potentially the reader some days later, pulling up on a bright and sunny crisp mountain mid-morning, after driving the winding mountain route climbing up a valley beside a cold and clear-flowing creek, hearing the creek as they got out of their car to walk into the cozy restaurant, ordering an omelet for breakfast, smelling the wafting scent and hearing the sizzle of it frying as they waited…
What a disappointment then to have to reparse and find it was only the mountain route that surprise-reopened! (So I'm with JW Brewer.)
But now I *am* hungry! Time to fix that!
Buzz79 said,
September 3, 2025 @ 8:13 am
Why is this usage different from the completely standard "surprise party"?
wgj said,
September 3, 2025 @ 8:21 am
@Brewer: If you consider "surprise" as a verb rather than noun, then the subject does line up: The same party that reopens also surprises (some other party).
@Buzz: Because people don't use "surprise party" as a verb? Or have you ever heard someone saying: "Let's surprise party him!"
ajay said,
September 3, 2025 @ 8:49 am
I think CuConnacht is almost certainly right – this is a verb phrase formed from the noun phrase "surprise reopening".
wgj: I feel like I've come across the phrase "surprise-attacked" in the wild, formed from "surprise attack". There is some ambiguity here because "surprise" could be a noun or a verb. Am I mounting an attack that is a surprise, or am I simultaneously surprising and attacking you?
What about finding some forms of a noun-noun pair where the second noun becomes a verb and the first noun can't possibly be a verb?
languagehat said,
September 3, 2025 @ 8:51 am
While it's certainly a striking grouping of words and a good subject for analysis, it would be absurd to pretend anything that occurs in a headline is an example of actual English. Headline writers are concerned with concision, not grammar.
Rodger C said,
September 3, 2025 @ 9:20 am
Or have you ever heard someone saying: "Let's surprise party him!"
If someone did, I'd understand them.
Jonathan Smith said,
September 3, 2025 @ 11:29 am
Although good examples of this involve plainly deverbal nouns — appearance, discovery, emergence… so "adverb" vibes feel fundamental and "surprise appear" is thus new but fully cromulent.
Mand. xin1 'new' is often used as such an adverb… I wonder how directly such uses came from adj., i.e., could be that xin1 fa1xian4 'new discovery' or similar directly licensed now-ubiquitous xin1 fa1xian4 (de) 'newly discovered (stuff)'
Joe said,
September 3, 2025 @ 11:40 am
"Surprise party" isn't quite analogous because "party" is the same for both verb and noun (though I guess someone in the business could have verbed "open" already) and "surprise party" is a much more familiar phrase than "surprise reopen(ing)".
Maybe more analogous: "Neighboring country with historical claim stealth invades Ukraine." We can guess what a "stealth invasion" is even though we've probably never heard that phrase before, but then it's backformed to "stealth invades" and it's hard to keep track of what part of speech "stealth" is anymore, especially at the end of the noun-phrase pileup.
Joe said,
September 3, 2025 @ 11:40 am
* could have nouned "open"
David Morris said,
September 3, 2025 @ 3:17 pm
Adverbially, it 'surprisingly reopens', but that obviously means something different. I would otherwise suggest 'unexpectedly reopens'.
Chas Belov said,
September 3, 2025 @ 8:43 pm
@Duncan – The layout of the headline certainly lends itself to garden pathing.
@LanguageHat – That's a fair cop regarding headlinese.
Chas Belov said,
September 3, 2025 @ 8:47 pm
Oops, surprise forgot:
@Mark Liberman – ¡Thank you for the analysis!
David Marjanović said,
September 4, 2025 @ 4:01 am
Runaway verb prefixation surprise-reopens and stealth-attacks!
Noun incorporation! It's not just German* that's slowly but surely turning into Lakhota.
* autofahren, staubsaugen…
wgj said,
September 4, 2025 @ 1:02 pm
@David Those examples aren't German words – unless you capitalize them and use them as nouns. And even then, they are object-noun, which is not at all what we've talking about in this post. English (which is a Germanic language after all) itself uses object-noun constructs all the time, like trash-talking, hand-wringing, cost-cutting etc.