Talk:upright

Moved text from main article:

Noun

1. An upright piano.

Although an upright piano is a noun phrase, upright is an adjective, and piano is the noun in that phrase. --Connel MacKenzie 07:45, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Morally

What about morally upright? Coppertwig 01:48, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

RFV discussion: October 2022–February 2023

This entry has survived Wiktionary's verification process (permalink).

Please do not re-nominate for verification without comprehensive reasons for doing so.

---

upright

Rfv-POS “Adverb”. My sprachgefühl or experience tells me that one can’t actually use it like “perpendicularly” or “squarely” (without any difference from German aufrecht, and compare the adverb uprightly). If for instance you use it to qualify an adjective, it becomes a compound, say ”upright-aligned”, and it appears that the adverbial use has been wrongly inferred from depictive  or resultative predicative use: We have learned in the deletion discussion Wiktionary:Requests for deletion/Non-English#extrem → Talk:extrem about this common mistake in the dogmatics of grammar leading to the imagination of adverbs, and as I now find already Wiktionary:Tea room/2018/April#healthy, adverb sense it has been discussed. Consequentially, all fifteen instances the Oxford English dictionary (paywalled/institutionally accessible) cites for an adverb entry are not adverbial but predicative or parts compounds; so honestly on first look and on closer look of some of their cites it is easier to understand the occurrences not as adverbials. Pinging people of the preceding discussion and historical English knowledge: @Fytcha, Theknightwho, Lambiam, Hazarasp, Leasnam Fay Freak (talk) 16:55, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

I’ve checked on OneLook and McMillan, M-W, the AHD and the Cambridge Learners Dictionary all list the adverbial sense of upright, so there is lemming support for including it, fwiw. There’s less support for the verb sense but there is a specialist medical dictionary for dentists listed that claims one can ‘upright’ a tooth. --Overlordnat1 (talk) 18:01, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

Most of the instances of putative adverb use are following verbs like stay, sit, stand, place, and set. In such use vertically, but not vertical can replace upright. This seems like fairly clear evidence that we would not err to follow the lemmings and show upright as sometimes an adverb. DCDuring (talk) 18:24, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

With these verbs we can also rather say near and still which I don’t think are adverbials then. Our entry near demands an example for its alleged adverb sense “At or towards a position close in space or time”, for still the example ”they stood still until […]” is a fake example because it is the verb stand still which is in other West Germanic languages are tantamount to a separable prefix – provided that one is likely to understand the aktionsart of the example as referring to a point time where standing commences rather than a duration where standing continues, as in stehenbleiben (“to stop move”) opposed to the SOP stehen bleiben (“to not cease to stand”), but even our example on stand still appears to extend over a duration: “stand still as an idea came” – if understood with durative aktionsart still is a depictive predicative there.

One can also stand ashamed, a very old expression and obviously not using the adjective adverbially since the standing itself is not ashamed, or stay awesome; with place and set the use would of course be resultative – I claim that in spite of the circumstance that in the very same contexts vertically would be used as an adverbial – either syntactic category can occur in this context by reason that in order to render something vertical, the motion to do so or the act of implementation also uses to be vertical; a similar pragmatic equivalence of syntactic categories is the case with an agent remaining vertical. Fay Freak (talk) 19:45, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

I now have noticed that there are multiple senses of “to stand” you can refer to, I thought about the more common intransitive one above, which is also in the example at still, but there is this in one school dictionary “She stood her bike upright against the wall” claimed an adverb. Contrary to its claim it is not likely an adverb, the point and emphasis here being that the result how the bike stands in the end is upright or vertical, while not the act of “standing”—I don’t know how much one hears in schools about predicatives. There are at least many wrong pretenders to be seen, the question is what and whether something at all remains after trying to distill any actual adverbial use, which I have called into doubt. Fay Freak (talk) 20:01, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

RFV Passed, "stand upright" is very common. Ioaxxere (talk) 02:53, 14 February 2023 (UTC)