The Adjective

What is an Adjective?

• It describes a noun or a pronoun , a quality of a substance

• It gives the reader extra information
 Morphological characteristics

Degrees of comparison
Comparative -- if you are discussing two people, places or things
Mike has a thicker notebook than Nina

Superlative -if you have three or more people, places or things

The thinnest notebook belongs to Mike

*Some adjectives have irregular forms of degrees of comparison

 Syntactical Characteristics
An adjective may be used as an attribute or as a Predicative

*Predicate adjective
It can’t get inflected for tense, so it has to go around with an auxiliary be that
holds the tense: She is tired.

*Attributive adjective
It modifies a noun: the tired woman.
 Morphological composition

• SIMPLE  good, red

• DERIVATIVE beautiful , foolish ( suffixes and prefixes)
• COMPOUND  Snow-white , deaf-mute
 Classification of Adjetives
• Qualitative  denote qualities of a substance directly
Size, shape, color , physical and mental qualities
Little , hard, soft

• Relative denote qualitative of a substance through their relation to materials, place , time
and some actions.

*Silken, woollen , wooden

*Italian,Asian
*Monthly
*Rotatory,preparatory
 Grammatical Characteristics of Qualitative
Adjectives.
• 1.Degrees of comparison big, bigger, the biggest

• 2.No degrees of comparison incurable , unsuitable

• 3. Adverbs can be formed graceful , gracefylly

• 4.Attributes
• The big metal box
• A not-too-infrequent event

• 5. Predicatives
• The result was magnificent.
The weather appears nice.
 Grammatical Characteristics of Relative
Adjectives

• They no have degrees of comparison

• They do not form adverbs with the suffix –ly

*if they develop a figurative meaning adverbs can be formed

She speaks her lines rather woodenly
 Substantivized Adjectives
As is known adjectives under certain circumstances can be substantivized, i.e.
become nouns but their adjectival origin is still felt.

FULL when an adjective gets all the morphological features of nouns

Native
PARTIAL when adjectives get only some of the morphological features of
nouns
The French
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opinion age colour size shape material nationality