Adjective

An adjective (abbreviated ) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.

The adjective is considered one of the main parts of speech of the English language, although historically they were classed together with nouns. Nowadays, certain words that usually had been classified as adjectives, including the, this, my, etc., typically are classed separately, as determiners.

Examples:

That used to be an immensely funny idea. (Prepositive attributive)
That idea is funny. (Predicative)
The good, the bad, and the funny. (Substantive)
Clara Oswald, completely funny, died three times. (Appositive)

Etymology

Adjective comes from Latin ', a calque of (whence also English epithet). In the grammatical tradition of Latin and Greek, because adjectives were inflected for gender, number, and case like nouns (a process called declension), 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:

Within a noun phrase, a prepositive adjective is antecedent to the head noun, which it modifies attributively. For example, in "I put my happy kids into the car", happy occurs on an antecedent basis within the my happy kids noun phrase (kids being its head), and is therefore a prepositive adjective.
Postpositive adjectives occur after the noun or pronoun they modify: within a noun phrase, immediately subsequent to the head noun or pronoun, which it modifies attributively, e.g. "The only room available cost twice what we expected"; in an adjacent appositive phrase, e.g. "My kid, happy as a clam, was already in the back seat"; or linked to the noun or pronoun via a copular, resultative, depictive or other linking mechanism, as a predicative adjective, e.g. "My kids are happy", "I wiped the table clean" and "We danced naked in the rain" 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 (typically nouns in English) and some nominals seem to denote attributes (typically adjectives in English).

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. Other language authorities, like the Cambridge Dictionary, state that shape precedes rather than follows age.

Determiners and postdeterminers—articles, numerals, and other limiters (e.g. three blind mice)—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 (including any attributive adjectives).

Opinion – limiter adjectives (e.g. a real hero, a perfect idiot) and adjectives of subjective measure (e.g. beautiful, supportive) or value (e.g. good, bad, costly)
Size – adjectives denoting physical size (e.g. tiny, big, extensive)
Age – adjectives denoting age (e.g. young, old, new, ancient, six-year-old)
Shape or physical quality – adjectives describing more detailed physical attributes than overall size (e.g. round, sharp, turgid, thin)
Colour – adjectives denoting colour or pattern (e.g. white, black, pale, splotchy)
Origin – denominal adjectives denoting source (e.g. Japanese, volcanic, extraterrestrial)
Material – denominal adjectives denoting what something is made of (e.g., plastic, metallic, wooden)
Qualifier/purpose – final limiter, which sometimes forms part of the (compound) noun (e.g., high chair, northern cabin, passenger car, book cover)

This means that, in English, adjectives pertaining to size precede adjectives pertaining to age ("little old", not "old little"), which in turn generally precede adjectives pertaining to colour ("old white", not "white old"). So, one would say "One (quantity) nice (opinion) little (size) old (age) round (shape) [or round old] white (colour) brick (material) 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".

An adjective is intersective if and only if the extension of its combination with a noun is equal to the intersection of its extension and that of the noun its modifying. For example, the adjective carnivorous is intersective, given the extension of carnivorous mammal is the intersection of the extensions of carnivorous and mammal (i.e., the set of all mammals who are carnivorous).
An adjective is subsective if and only if the extension of its combination with a noun is a subset of the extension of the noun. For example, the extension of skillful surgeon is a subset of the extension of surgeon, but it is not the intersection of that and the extension of skillful, as that would include (for example) incompetent surgeons who are skilled violinists. All intersective adjectives are subsective, but the term 'subsective' is sometimes used to refer to only those subsective adjectives which are not intersective.
An adjective is privative if and only if the extension of its combination with a noun is disjoint from the extension of the noun. For example, fake is privative because a <u>fake</u> cat is not a cat.
A plain nonsubsective adjective is an adjective that is not subsective or privative. For example, the word possible is this kind of adjective, as the extension of possible murderer overlaps with, but is not included in the extension of murderer (as some, but not all, possible murderers are murderers).

Explanatory notes

References

External links

List of English collateral adjectives at Wiktionary