syntactic analysis - What part of speech is "fun" in “Hiking is fun”?


Please consisder the sentence



Hiking is fun.



What is each word’s part of speech?




  • Hiking = gerund




  • is = verb




  • fun = _____?




I don’t know what fun is here. Is it



  1. an adverb that modifies the copular verb is?

  2. a predicate adjective modifying hiking?

  3. a noun as a predicate complement in the copula?



Answer



In the sentence "Hiking is fun," the word "fun" is an adjective. It's the same type of construction as, for example, "My mother is tall."


The word "fun" can be a noun as well as an adjective, and the verb "is" can link two nouns ("My mother is a teacher"), so I can see where you might be confused. But in the sentence "Hiking is fun," most English speakers would understand "fun" as an adjective, almost as if it were shorthand for "Hiking is a fun thing to do."


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