Adjective


In linguistics, an adjective is a word that modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
Adjectives are one of the main parts of speech of the English language, although historically they were classed together with nouns. Certain words that were traditionally considered to be adjectives, including the, this, my, etc., are today usually classed separately, as determiners.

Etymology

Adjective comes from Latin nōmen adjectīvum, a calque of epítheton ónoma. In the grammatical tradition of Latin and Greek, because adjectives were inflected for gender, number, and case like nouns, they were considered a type of noun. The words that are today typically called nouns were then called substantive nouns. The terms noun substantive and noun adjective were formerly used in English but are now obsolete.

Types of use

Depending on the language, an adjective can precede a corresponding noun on a prepositive basis or it can follow a corresponding noun on a postpositive basis. Structural, contextual, and style considerations can impinge on the pre- or post- position of an adjective in a given instance of its occurrence. In English, occurrences of adjectives generally can be classified into one of three categories:
  1. Prepositive adjectives, which are also known as "attributive adjectives," occur on an antecedent basis within a noun phrase. For example: "I put my happy kids into the car," wherein happy occurs on an antecedent basis within the my happy kids noun phrase, and therefore functions in a prepositive adjective.
  2. Postpositive adjectives can occur: ' immediately subsequent to a noun within a noun phrase, e.g. "I took a short drive around with my happy kids;" ' as linked via a copula or other linking mechanism subsequent to a corresponding noun or pronoun; for example: "My kids are happy," wherein happy is a predicate adjective ; or ' as an appositive adjective within a noun phrase, e.g. "My kids, happy to go cruising, are in the back seat."
  3. Nominalized adjectives', which function as nouns. One way this happens is by eliding a noun from an adjective-noun noun phrase, whose remnant thus is a nominalization. In the sentence, "I read two books to them; he preferred the sad book, but she preferred the happy", happy is a nominalized adjective, short for "happy one" or "happy book". Another way this happens is in phrases like "out with the old, in with the new", where "the old" means "that which is old" or "all that is old", and similarly with "the new". In such cases, the adjective may function as a mass noun. In English, it may also function as a plural count noun denoting a collective group, as in "The meek shall inherit the Earth", where "the meek" means "those who are meek" or "all who are meek".

    Distribution

Adjectives feature as a part of speech in most languages. In some languages, the words that serve the semantic function of adjectives are categorized together with some other class, such as nouns or verbs. In the phrase "a Ford car", "Ford" is unquestionably a noun but its function is adjectival: to modify "car". In some languages adjectives can function as nouns: for example, the Spanish phrase "uno rojo" means "a red ".
As for "confusion" with verbs, rather than an adjective meaning "big", a language might have a verb that means "to be big" and could then use an attributive verb construction analogous to "big-being house" to express what in English is called a "big house". Such an analysis is possible for the grammar of Standard Chinese, for example.
Different languages do not use adjectives in exactly the same situations. For example, where English uses "to be hungry", Dutch, French, and Spanish use "honger hebben", "avoir faim", and "tener hambre" respectively. Similarly, where Hebrew uses the adjective זקוק, English uses the verb "to need".
In languages that have adjectives as a word class, it is usually an open class; that is, it is relatively common for new adjectives to be formed via such processes as derivation. However, Bantu languages are well known for having only a small closed class of adjectives, and new adjectives are not easily derived. Similarly, native Japanese adjectives are considered a closed class, although nouns may be used in the genitive to convey some adjectival meanings, and there is also the separate open class of adjectival nouns.

Adverbs

Many languages distinguish between adjectives, which qualify nouns and pronouns, and adverbs, which mainly modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. Not all languages make this exact distinction; many have words that can function as either. For example, in English, fast is an adjective in "a fast car" but an adverb in "he drove fast".
In Dutch and German, adjectives and adverbs are usually identical in form and many grammarians do not make the distinction, but patterns of inflection can suggest a difference:
A German word like klug takes endings when used as an attributive adjective but not when used adverbially. Whether these are distinct parts of speech or distinct usages of the same part of speech is a question of analysis. It can be noted that, while German linguistic terminology distinguishes adverbiale from adjektivische Formen, German refers to both as Eigenschaftswörter.

Determiners

Linguists today distinguish determiners from adjectives, considering them to be two separate parts of speech. But formerly determiners were considered to be adjectives in some of their uses. Determiners are words that are neither nouns nor pronouns, yet reference a thing already in context. They generally do this by indicating definiteness, quantity, or another such property.

Adjective phrases

An adjective acts as the head of an adjective phrase or adjectival phrase. In the simplest case, an adjective phrase consists solely of the adjective; more complex adjective phrases may contain one or more adverbs modifying the adjective, or one or more complements. In English, attributive adjective phrases that include complements typically follow the noun that they qualify.

Other modifiers of nouns

In many languages it is possible for nouns to modify other nouns. Unlike adjectives, nouns acting as modifiers usually are not predicative; a beautiful park is beautiful, but a car park is not "car". The modifier often indicates origin, purpose, semantic patient or semantic subject ; however, it may generally indicate almost any semantic relationship. It is also common for adjectives to be derived from nouns, as in boyish, birdlike, behavioral , famous, manly, angelic, and so on.
In Australian Aboriginal languages, the distinction between adjectives and nouns is typically thought weak, and many of the languages only use nouns--or nouns with a limited set of adjective-deriving affixes--to modify other nouns. In languages that have a subtle adjective-noun distinction, one way to tell them apart is that a modifying adjective can come to stand in for an entire elided noun phrase, while a modifying noun cannot. For example, in Bardi, the adjective moorrooloo 'little' in the phrase moorrooloo baawa ‘little child’ can stand on its own to mean 'the little one,' while the attributive noun aamba 'man' in the phrase aamba baawa 'male child' cannot stand for the whole phrase to mean 'the male one.' In other languages, like Warlpiri, nouns and adjectives are lumped together beneath the nominal umbrella because of their shared syntactic distribution as arguments of predicates. The only thing distinguishing them is that some nominals seem to semantically denote entities and some nominals seem to denote attributes.
Many languages have special verbal forms called participles that can act as noun modifiers. Sometimes participles develop into pure adjectives. Examples in English include relieved, spoken, and going.
Other constructs that often modify nouns include prepositional phrases, relative clauses, and infinitive phrases. Some nouns can also take complements such as content clauses, but these are not commonly considered modifiers. For more information about possible modifiers and dependents of nouns, see Components of noun phrases.

Order

In many languages, attributive adjectives usually occur in a specific order. In general, the adjective order in English can be summarised as: opinion, size, age or shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. This sequence is sometimes referred to by the mnemonic OSASCOMP. Other language authorities, like the Cambridge Dictionary, state that shape precedes rather than follows age.
Determiners—articles, numerals and other limiters —come before attributive adjectives in English. Although certain combinations of determiners can appear before a noun, they are far more circumscribed than adjectives in their use—typically, only a single determiner would appear before a noun or noun phrase.
  1. Opinion – limiter adjectives and adjectives of subjective measure or value
  2. Size – adjectives denoting physical size
  3. Age – adjectives denoting age
  4. Shape – adjectives describing more detailed physical attributes than overall size
  5. Colour – adjectives denoting colour
  6. Origin – denominal adjectives denoting source
  7. Material – denominal adjectives denoting what something is made of
  8. Qualifier/purpose – final limiter, which sometimes forms part of the noun
This means that, in English, adjectives pertaining to size precede adjectives pertaining to age, which in turn generally precede adjectives pertaining to colour. So, one would say "One nice little old round white brick house." When several adjectives of the same type are used together, they are ordered from general to specific, like "lovely intelligent person" or "old medieval castle".
This order may be more rigid in some languages than others; in some, like Spanish, it may only be a default word order, with other orders being permissible. Other languages, such as Tagalog, follow their adjectival orders as rigidly as English.
The normal adjectival order of English may be overridden in certain circumstances, especially when one adjective is being :wikt:front#English-move to sentence start|fronted. In addition, the usual order of adjectives in English would result in the phrase "the bad big wolf", but instead, the usual phrase is "the big bad wolf", perhaps because the ablaut reduplication rule that high vowels precede low vowels overrides the normal order of adjectives.
Owing partially to borrowings from French, English has some adjectives that follow the noun as postmodifiers, called postpositive adjectives, as in time immemorial and attorney general. Adjectives may even change meaning depending on whether they precede or follow, as in proper: They live in a proper town vs. They live in the town proper. All adjectives can follow nouns in certain constructions, such as tell me something new.

Comparison (degrees)

In many languages, some adjectives are comparable and the measure of comparison is called degree. For example, a person may be "polite", but another person may be "more polite", and a third person may be the "most polite" of the three. The word "more" here modifies the adjective "polite" to indicate a comparison is being made, and "most" modifies the adjective to indicate an absolute comparison.
Among languages that allow adjectives to be compared, different means are used to indicate comparison. Some languages do not distinguish between comparative and superlative forms. Other languages allow adjectives to be compared but do not have a special comparative form of the adjective. In such cases, as in some Australian Aboriginal languages, case-marking, such as the ablative case may be used to indicate one entity has more of an adjectival quality than another. Take the following example in Bardi:
In English, many adjectives can be inflected to comparative and superlative forms by taking the suffixes "-er" and "-est", respectively:
Some adjectives are irregular in this sense:
Some adjectives can have both regular and irregular variations:
also
Another way to convey comparison is by incorporating the words "more" and "most". There is no simple rule to decide which means is correct for any given adjective, however. The general tendency is for simpler adjectives and those from Anglo-Saxon to take the suffixes, while longer adjectives and those from French, Latin, or Greek do not—but sometimes sound of the word is the deciding factor.
Many adjectives do not naturally lend themselves to comparison. For example, some English speakers would argue that it does not make sense to say that one thing is "more ultimate" than another, or that something is "most ultimate", since the word "ultimate" is already absolute in its semantics. Such adjectives are called non-comparable or absolute. Nevertheless, native speakers will frequently play with the raised forms of adjectives of this sort. Although "pregnant" is logically non-comparable, one may hear a sentence like "She looks more and more pregnant each day". Likewise "extinct" and "equal" appear to be non-comparable, but one might say that a language about which nothing is known is "more extinct" than a well-documented language with surviving literature but no speakers, while George Orwell wrote, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others". These cases may be viewed as evidence that the base forms of these adjectives are not as absolute in their semantics as is usually thought.
Comparative and superlative forms are also occasionally used for other purposes than comparison. In English comparatives can be used to suggest that a statement is only tentative or tendential: one might say "John is more the shy-and-retiring type," where the comparative "more" is not really comparing him with other people or with other impressions of him, but rather, could be substituting for "on the whole". In Italian, superlatives are frequently used to put strong emphasis on an adjective: bellissimo means "most beautiful", but is in fact more commonly heard in the sense "extremely beautiful".

Restrictiveness

Attributive adjectives and other noun modifiers may be used either restrictively or non-restrictively. For example:
In some languages, such as Spanish, restrictiveness is consistently marked; for example, in Spanish la tarea difícil means "the difficult task" in the sense of "the task that is difficult", whereas la difícil tarea means "the difficult task" in the sense of "the task, which is difficult". In English, restrictiveness is not marked on adjectives but is marked on relative clauses.

Agreement

In some languages, adjectives alter their form to reflect the gender, case and number of the noun that they describe. This is called agreement or concord. Usually it takes the form of inflections at the end of the word, as in Latin:
In Celtic languages, however, initial consonant lenition marks the adjective with a feminine singular noun, as in Irish:
Often, distinction is made here between attributive and predicative usage. In English, adjectives never agree, whereas in French, they always agree. In German, they agree only when they are used attributively, and in Hungarian, they agree only when they are used predicatively: