Adjectives
Adjectives
The traditional definition of an adjective is as follows. "An adjective qualifies a noun." Morphologically adjectives take some derivational suffixes.
- y - cloud - cloudy ...
- ly - beast - beastly, man - manly ...
- ish - girl - girlish, boy - boyish ...
- al - nasal, dental, legal, chemical, personal, accidental ...
- ous - (ious,eous, uous) - prosperous, piteous, ambitious, sumptuous, ambiguous ...
- ic - comic, artistic ...
- ar - globular, stellar ...
- ary - momentary, planetary ...
- ful - careful, beautiful , grateful ...
- less - careless, merciless ...
- an - cosmopolitan , metropolitan , urban , American, Indian ...
- ble -( able/ ible ) - enjoyable, portable, credible, legible, visible ...
Often adjectives are Monosyllabic words.
Eg- Warm, fresh , red, new ... A large number of adjectives take
- Positive
- Comparative
- Superlative
Eg: tall – taller – tallest
Polysyllabic Adjectives – Generally appear with the words more and most and here we don’t use ‘er’ and ‘est’ terms as in other adjectives. For example more beautiful, most beautiful.
Some adjectives do not appear in the comparative or superlative forms. For example adjectives such as utter, asleep, marry...
Some of these words can be modified by the word 'very' yet some words can't. For example you can't use 'very utter, very marry ...
Syntactically adjectives occur in three main possessions
- Adjective occurs attributively as a noun - pre-modified
EG- A red car, A nice frock
- Adjective occurs predictively as a compliment at the end of the sentence.
- EG: A car is red, The information was useful