Adjective

An Adjective is a part-of-speech role for a content word that modifies the meaning of a noun (or pronoun).

• AKA: Adj, JJ.
• Context:
  • It can denote qualities, characteristics and properties of things and phenomena.
  • It can be compared for degree: Positive Adjective, Comparative Adjective, and Superlative Adjective.
  • It can be a Predicate Adjective.
  • It can be a Compound Adjective, such as “real time”.
  • It can be the Adjective Head of an Adjective Phrase, such as “more difficult”.
  • It can be:
    • a Descriptive Adjective.
    • an Adjective of Quantity.
    • a Numeral Adjective.
    • a Demonstrative Adjective.
    • a Distributive Adjective.
    • an Interrogative Adjective.
    • a Proper Adjective.
    • an Emphasising Adjective.
    • an Exclamatory Adjective.
  • …
• Example(s):
  • “blue”: "Where is the [blue] car."
  • “big”: "I saw a very [big] dog."
  • “happy”: "They are [happy]." and "That made me [happy]." are Predicate Adjectives.
  • “quick”, “brown”, “lazy”: “The [quick], [brown] fox jumps over the [lazy] dog.”
  • “square”
  • “certain”
  • “underwhelmed”
  • “small”, “smaller”, “smallest”
  • “good”, “better”, “best”
  • “difficult”, “more difficult”, “most difficult”
  • “real time”, a Compound Adjective.
  • “over-the-counter”, a Compound Adjective.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • “very”: "I saw a [very] big dog." is an Adverb.
• See: Adjective Phrase, Part-of-Speech, Predicative, Concept Property.

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References

• (WordNet, 2009) ⇒ http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=adjective
  • Noun
    • S: (n) adjective (a word that expresses an attribute of something)
    • S: (n) adjective (the word class that qualifies nouns)
  • Adjective
    • S: (adj) adjectival, adjective (of or relating to or functioning as an adjective) "adjectival syntax"; "an adjective clause"
    • S: (adj) adjective, procedural (relating to court practice and procedure as opposed to the principles of law) "adjective law"
• (Wikipedia, 2009) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective
  • In grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a noun or pronoun, giving more information about the noun or pronoun's definition.
• Wiktionary http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/adjective
  • Noun
    • 1. Additional or adjunct.
    • 2. (law) Applying to methods of enforcement and rules of procedure. adjective law
• http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/enc/words.htm
  • `Adjective' is a word-class, not a grammatical function. One of the two main uses of adjectives is `attributive', i.e. modifying a common noun (e.g. big book), but this does not mean that any word which modifies a common noun must be an adjective. For example, in big linguistics book, linguistics modifies book, and has the same grammatical function as big (namely, adjunct), but belongs to a different word-class: noun. This is easy to prove because linguistics may in turn be modified by an adjective, such as theoretical: thus in theoretical linguistics book, theoretical is an adjective modifying the noun linguistics, which in turn modifies book. Had linguistics been an adjective, it could not have taken another adjective as its modifier. For example, although nice big book is possible, with two adjectives, these both modify book; if we use them after BE only one is possible (*It is nice big), which shows that nice does not modify big (unlike, say, extremely in extremely big). Most adjectives can be used in two ways, either attributively (as pre-adjuncts of common nouns) or predicatively (as sharer of a verb such as BE):----