I'm curious about trying to "swap" adjectives and verbs in English. What I mean by this is to take information that would normally be conveyed via an adjective, and convey it using a verb instead, and vice-versa. So for example, instead of "This bowl is too hot.", say "The bowl is heating excessively." and instead of "I went to the gym last night.", "Last night, I was gym-colocated." (I'm not too happy about that last example, because it uses a passive form of the verb "to colocate", so I didn't really avoid using verbs altogether).

What this exercise is supposed to illustrate is that there are these "clearly" separate concept of "action" and "properties", and we traditionally use verbs to convey action and adjectives to convey properties. However, perhaps there exists concepts which are forced by our language (in the Sapir-Whorf sense) to be intuitively seen as an action versus a property, or the other way around.

The awkwardness of converting "Last night, I went to the gym." to "Last night, I was gym-colocated." hints that the concept of "going somewhere" is "clearly" an action, and definitely not a property. Fine, that's an intuitive result for our thought experiment. Are there any unintuitive ones?

In English, we have a verb "to like". So my thesis is that the existence of this verb makes English speakers tend to categorize the concept as an action. When I say "I like ice-cream", I am performing the action of liking ice cream. But wait, is that really an action I am performing, rather than a property of ice cream? The first objection I had to the idea that "likeability" was a property of ice cream was the presence of a subject "I": To say "Ice-cream is likeable" is not the same as saying "I like ice-cream", and so therefore since there is a subject "I", "like" is clearly an action and thus justified in being a verb.

The counter-argument to that objection is that there are many properties which are subjective: "Ice cream is delicious" (to whom?); "This bowl is too hot" (for whom?). The "subject" is implied to be the person speaking the sentence.

In fact, in Japanese, "like" is an adjective: 「アイスクリームが好きです。」 "Ice cream is likeable (subjective to me)".

So which concepts do we, as English speakers, automatically assume are actions, but other languages see as properties, and vice versa? That's what the "swapping" exercise at the beginning is supposed to help uncover.