why do we need to study english?

fuck why you gotta do this to a linguistics minor i'm going to be thinking about this for like a week but not have have the knowledge to actually answer it


Let's see, for me:

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SpoilerGood
-warm
-cold (but I'm not sure when you'd want to tell someone to keep cold)
-quiet
-busy

Bad
-alive
-beautiful
-loud
-rich
-healthy
-full
-empty
-free
-happy
-sad

For context, I'm a native English speaker from California.

My guess is for me "Keep X" is not a productive rule that you can put new adjectives in but there's specific phrases I've heard that work?

For me at least it's not whether "(it)" can go in between them, since that doesn't seem to be how the syntax tree breaks down for me. If you're telling someone to keep warm, there's no other thing that you want to be warm, you want the listener themself to stay warm.

It also is totally reasonable for -ing verb phrases to generally fit even though adjectives generally don't, I just think that means they're being verb phrases and not being adjective-ish things if that makes sense?

Edit:
Looking on Google NGrams, these definitely seem like things it's attested at least some people have said (besides the ones I say):

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Spoiler
Keep alive (Them was the Days, Panchatantra) (also i didn't read them or look into them at all so this isn't an accusation or anything but there's a chance one or both of these might be racist people trying to imitate some other people so it might not be 100% true that anyone would actually say this just based on google ngrams)
Keep beautiful (Pennsylvania Journal of Health, Physical Education, Recreation)
Keep loud (Poetry Ireland - Issues 1-19 - Page 8) (but like, in a poem, is that going to be someone talking normally?)
Keep healthy (Keeping Healthy, Healthy, that's me: a health education curriculum guide for Head Start, The cooperative development of an elementary science program in the ...) (this definitely seems like something that's normal for a lot of people to say)
If you count "free from X" or "free of X" is basically just the adjective "free", then I've found a lot of examples of that and also I find that a normal thing to say.
Keep happy (The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twelfth Annual Collection - Page 26, Angels Can Fly Because They Take Themselves Lightly: How to Keep ...)

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SpoilerKeep rich did seem to be used in like the 19th century to mean stay rich, not sure if that counts for you?
Keep full maybe seems like something people have said in that context, but again only in a super old case, and maybe in context here they're saying to keep an implied object full which isn't the same structure?
"Keep empty cans/bottles/etc" is such a common thing to say that I can't tell if people say keep empty without something after it
I didn't really see "keep sad" either, but that might not be because it doesn't make sense syntactically or semantically to say, but just because it would be a mean thing to say.

It looks like other people are comfortable with more cases of "Keep [adjective]" than I am. At this point, if I had to guess, I'd guess that around the 19th century "Keep [adjective]" was a productive rule that made sense to say with any adjective, meaning and structured like "Stay [adjective]", but that now the only examples of it that work (at least for me) were specific examples that stuck around as idioms?

Let me know if anything I wrote didn't make sense, because I'm sure that's the case haha