r/grammar • u/Creative_Fudge4684 • 8h ago

I can't think of a word... Obligatory Question

Hello, I have a brief, possibly nonsense question about the Verb/Adjective 'obligate'. Obligate in its common scientific usage is as an adjective modifying a stipulation (obligate carnivore, for example) though seems to be an adaptation of the verb obligate, serving the same form as 'obligatory carnivore' or 'obligated carnivore' pronounced with the last syllable as 'git', rather than 'gate'. This is similar in my mind to effeminate, adapted as the past participle of effeminare or effeminatus, pronounced with the last syllable with the same transition from 'ate' to 'it'. My question is so: is there a name for this (niche) form of attributive verbs? They seem to conjugate based on the base form spelling of the verb, though indicating either a present or past state to the verb. The only other example I can think of is predicate, as in a predicate assumption, though if you were going to conjugate this, why use this form, rather than 'predicated assumption'?

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u/Creative_Fudge4684 8h ago

oh, obviously, I forgot about separate. You pronounce the adjective as separ-it rather than seper-ate

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u/francksiduo 4h ago

There's a name for the mechanism, even if not for the whole word class: it's the English reflex of Latin -atus past participles doing double duty. Graduate, delegate, duplicate, moderate, separate, articulate, estimate, associate all split exactly the way you noticed with obligate and predicate: full vowel /eɪt/ when it's the verb, reduced to schwa when it's the noun or adjective.

What's happening isn't really "conjugation" in the usual sense. The Latin participle got borrowed into English twice, once as an adjective/noun (final syllable stays unstressed, so the vowel reduces), and once reanalyzed as a verb stem (English verbs resist that reduction more, so the full vowel sticks). So predicate-the-verb and predicate-the-adjective are better thought of as two separate borrowings of the same Latin form that diverged in stress and vowel quality, not one word flexing into different roles.

Linguists usually just call these -ate heteronyms or noun/verb stress pairs rather than giving the pattern its own name.

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u/Creative_Fudge4684 4h ago

YES! thank you, you are my hero!