Adjectives | English Grammar | Itselfu
Definition
Adjectives are the words or the group of words that show the quality of noun/pronoun or provide some additional information about them. In other words, Adjectives describe a noun or pronoun. Adjectives are used almost exclusively to modify nouns, as well as any phrase or part of speech functioning as a noun. For example:
• “John wears red glasses.” (Red modifies the noun glasses.)
• “A loud group of students passed by.” (Loud modifies the noun phrase group of students.)
• “Excellent writing is required for this job.” (Excellent modifies the gerund writing.)
Attributive vs. Predicative Adjectives
Adjectives are broken down into two basic syntactic categories: attributive and predicative.
Adjectives that appear directly before (or sometimes directly after) the noun or pronoun they modify are known as attributive adjectives. These can appear anywhere in a sentence, and can modify parts of either the subject or the predicate.
Predicative adjectives, on the other hand, always appear after the noun they modify, connected to it by a linking verb. They are one of the three types of subject complements, and they are always part of the predicate—hence their name.
Let’s compare two examples to highlight this difference:
• “The black dog is barking.” In this sentence, black is an attributive adjective. It is part of the noun phrase and is not connected to the noun dog by a linking verb. Now let’s look at a predicative adjective:
• “The dog was black.” In this sentence, black is a predicative adjective. It follows dog, the noun that it modifies, and is connected to it by the linking verb was.
Modifying pronouns
While adjectives usually modify nouns, they can also modify pronouns. This most commonly occurs when adjectives are predicative. For example:
• “That was great!”
• “She is very nice.”
• “A few were late.”
Attributive adjectives can also modify indefinite pronouns, as in:
• “A happy few were able to attend the show.”
• “They were the lucky ones.”
In informal speech or writing, it is not uncommon to modify personal pronouns attributively, as in:
• “Wow, lucky you!”
• “Silly me, I forgot to turn on the oven.”
However, avoid using attributive adjectives with personal pronouns in anything other than casual conversation or writing.
Categories of adjectives
There is a huge variety of adjectives in English. While many words are inherently adjectival, such as colors (red, black, yellow, etc.) or characteristics (strong, weak, nice, etc.), there are also several categories of adjectives that are formed from other sources. The below gives a brief breakdown of these different categories of adjectives, along with some examples of how they are used in a sentence. Go to each individual topic to learn more.
Kinds of the Adjectives
- Proper Adjectives
- Compound Adjectives
- Demonstrative Adjectives
- Interrogative Adjectives
- Nominal Adjectives
- Collective Adjectives
Proper Adjectives
Proper adjectives, like all adjectives, modify nouns, but they are different from other adjectives because they are actually formed from proper nouns.
A noun, we know, is a person, place, or thing. We can distinguish between two types of nouns: common nouns and proper nouns. Common nouns are general, such as man, street, and city. James, Canning Street, and Paris are all proper nouns, because they talk about specific people, places, or things. “James” is a specific man, “Canning Street” is a specific street, and “Paris” is a specific city. Proper nouns are always written with a capital letter in English.
Proper adjectives are formed from these proper nouns, and they are also capitalized. They are often made from the names of cities, countries, or regions to describe where something comes from, but they can also be formed from the names of religions, brands, or even individuals. Some examples will make this clear:
Collective Adjectives
Collective adjectives are a subgroup of nominal adjectives, or adjectives that act as nouns. They are used to refer to a group of people based on a characteristic that they share. For example:
• “The rich should help the poor.”
This sentence is another way of saying, “Rich people should help poor people.”
Some common collective adjectives are: the blind, the elderly, the hardworking, the homeless, the innocent, the intelligent, the poor, the rich, the sick, the strong, the weak and the young.
In addition, a large amount of collective adjectives refer to the nationality of a group of people. For example, instead of saying “French people cook well,” we can say, “The French cook well.” Other nationalities for which we have collective adjectives are: the Chinese, the English, the Irish, the Japanese, the Scottish, the Spanish and the Vietnamese.
Demonstrative Adjectives
Like all adjectives, demonstrative adjectives modify nouns or pronouns. We use demonstrative adjectives to specify what we are referring to, to indicate whether the person or thing is singular or plural, and to give the listener information about that person or object’s proximity to the speaker (identifying whether it’s nearby or far away). Because they are used to determine a specific noun, demonstrative adjectives are sometimes known as demonstrative determiners. There are four common demonstrative adjectives in English: this, that, these, and those.
Demonstrative adjectives always come before the noun they modify. Often, they start the sentence. For example:
They can also come at the middle or at the end, as long as they are followed by a noun (if they were not followed by a noun, they would become demonstrative pronouns):
In the examples above, the demonstrative adjective is placed immediately before the noun it modifies. However, if there are additional adjectives that also modify the same noun, they should be placed between the demonstrative adjective and the noun. For example:
Interrogative Adjectives
Like all adjectives, interrogative adjectives (also known as interrogative determiners) modify nouns and pronouns. English has three interrogative adjectives: what, which, and whose. They are called “interrogative” because they are usually used to ask questions. For example:
In each of the examples, the interrogative adjective modifies the noun it immediately precedes: book, shirt, and computer.
Nominal Adjectives
We know that adjectives are words that modify (or describe) nouns, such as the word red in “the red jacket,” or the word beautiful in “that girl is beautiful.”
Nominal adjectives, on the other hand, are adjectives that perform the function of a noun in a sentence. They are preceded by the word the and can be found as the subject or the object of a sentence or clause. For example:
In the examples above, the nominal adjectives do not modify any other noun— they’re acting as nouns themselves. Specifically, they are performing the function of the subject of the sentences, but, as we mentioned, they can also function as objects. For example:
Collective Adjectives
Collective adjectives are nominal adjectives that are used to refer to groups of people. Sometimes they refer to a shared physical characteristic, such as the blind, the deaf, the short, or the tall. Other times, they refer to non-physical characteristics, like the hardworking, the intelligent, the poor, or the rich.
In each of these cases, the nominal adjective takes the place of a lengthier description, such as “all the people who are rich,” or “all the intelligent people.” Collective adjectives can also refer to some nationalities, such as the Chinese, the English, or the French.
If you’d like to learn more about collective adjectives, they are covered in greater depth in their own section of the chapter about the Categories of Adjectives.
Other Adjectives
Most of the time, nominal adjectives are collective, comparative, and superlative adjectives. However, just about any adjective can be made nominal. They can make sentences shorter and more concise by avoiding repetitive use of a noun. Here are some instances in which nominal adjectives might be preferable:
