Adjective
An adjective is a word that describes or modifies a noun or pronoun by providing more information about its qualities, characteristics, or attributes. In language, adjectives can indicate size, color, shape, age, and more. They play a crucial role in adding detail and specificity to the nouns they modify.
3 Key excerpts on "Adjective"
eBook - ePubNavigating English Grammar
A Guide to Analyzing Real Language
- Anne Lobeck, Kristin Denham(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...We begin, however, with the semantics and morphology of Adjectives. Adjective Semantics The semantics of Adjectives is (as you might expect) quite complex. In general, Adjectives (and more specifically, Adjective phrases) are modifiers, or phrases that describe nouns, as we mentioned above. Another interesting property of Adjectives is that they fall into a number of different semantic classes. Here are a few, though there are more! value/opinion (nasty, awful, worse) size (tiny, enormous) age/temperature (old, warm) shape (oblong, twisted, round) color (blue, red, fuchsia) origin (Brazilian, foreign, Northwestern) material (plastic, wooden) English is a language with a preferred order of Adjectives; Adjectives in certain classes precede those in other classes. The general schema for English follows the order in the list above. For example, size Adjectives precede color Adjectives, which precede material Adjectives (there is some variability in possible orders, as you may find as you examine different examples): the big brown wooden table size color material *the brown wooden big table color material size *the wooden brown big table material color size Native speakers pick up on the order unconsciously, but those who are learning English as a second language may find that this order may be different from the preferred order of Adjectives in their native language. That Adjectives of certain semantic classes occur in certain orders illustrates how semantics (meaning) interacts with syntax (word order). Another fact about Adjectives to note, which again illustrates the overlap of semantics and syntax, is that Adjectives can “iterate,” or occur in (potentially long) strings, provided that they occur in the right semantic sequence...
eBook - ePubAmerican English Grammar
An Introduction
- Seth R. Katz(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 4 Adjectives (A DJ) and Adjective Phrases (A DJ P); Determiners (D) and Determiner Phrases (DP) Adjectives are content words, traditionally defined as modifiers of nouns. By “modifying,” we mean that they qualify, limit, contextualize, or more closely define the thing that is being named by the noun. But, as modifiers, grammatically, they are optional constituents: if we drop an Adjective phrase (A DJ P) from an NP, the NP will still be well formed. We will use the word “Adjective” to refer to what are sometimes called descriptive Adjectives. Descriptive Adjectives are words such as tall, beautiful, happy, miserable, and blue that name qualities possessed by the things named by nouns: they describe nouns. Later in the chapter, we will examine a category of function words called determiners. Traditional grammar commonly fails to distinguish determiners from Adjectives since, like Adjectives, determiners function in NPs and fill slots preceding the noun. However, within NP s, determiners always precede the A DJ P; as we will see below, determiners differ from Adjectives in several key features—most notably that Adjectives are gradable (e.g. big, bigger, biggest), while determiners (e.g. the, their, seven) typically are not. 4.1 Adjective Forms Adjectives come in two forms: gradable and absolute (or non-gradable). Gradable Adjectives have three forms or degrees: the base, the comparative, and the superlative: Base : close, desirable, good Comparative : closer, more desirable, better Superlative : closest, most desirable, best The examples show the three ways in which the different degrees are formed...
eBook - ePub- David J. Young(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...4 Adjectives and Adjective phrases The predicative function The typical Adjective is able to function as a complement after the verb be. The following examples have the Adjectives underlined. The festival is lively His voice was harsh This problem has been difficult No man is infallible Your behaviour was foolhardy The music is loud The materials in use are brittle Those potatoes were hot When an Adjective occurs in this position it is said to be predicated of the subject: lively is predicated of the festival, brittle is predicated of the materials in use, and so on. This function of Adjectives is therefore said to be the predicative function. It is not only Adjectives that can be predicated of a subject. Nouns also can be used in this way, as in The festival is an expense, This problemhas been the stumbling block and The men arestudents. So how can we tell the difference between an Adjective and a noun? It is partly a question of what happens when an Adjective phrase contains more than a head. The words that can act as modifier to an Adjective head are different from those that can act as modifier to a noun head: His voice was very harsh This problem has been somewhat difficult The potatoes were terribly hot Some tigers are quite docile The words acting as modifiers to the Adjective heads in these examples are very, somewhat, terribly and quite. The name for this kind of modifier in Adjective phrases is intensifier. In noun phrases the noun head may have a determiner, while Adjective heads cannot have determiners. We can say every chair but not *every hot; and we can say terribly hot but not *terribly chair. Figure 16 shows the structure of the Adjective phrase. Figure 16 Furthermore, nouns can be inflected for plural number—at least, countable nouns can—while Adjectives cannot. *The men were hungries is not a possible sentence, while The men were students is all right. It is not only the verb be that can take an Adjective phrase as its complement...
