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).Mastronarde, Donald J. Introduction to Attic Greek. University of California Press, 2013. p. 60. 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 ().McMenomy, Bruce A. Syntactical Mechanics: A New Approach to English, Latin, and Greek. University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. p. 8. 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.See: "Attributive and predicative adjectives" at Lexico, archived 15 May 2020. 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" (see Subject complement, Object complement). Nominalized adjectives, which function as nouns. One way this happens is by eliding a noun from an adjective-noun noun phrase, whose remnant thus is a nominalization. In the sentence, "I read two books to them; he preferred the sad book, but she preferred the happy", happy is a nominalized adjective, short for "happy one" or "happy book". Another way this happens is in absolute phrases like "out with the old, in with the new", where "the old" means "that which is old" or "all that is old", and similarly with "the new". In such cases, the adjective may function as a mass noun (as in the preceding example). In English, it may also function as a plural count noun denoting a collective group, as in "The meek shall inherit the Earth", where "the meek" means "those who are meek" or "all who are meek".
Distribution Adjectives feature as a part of speech (word class) in most languages. In some languages, the words that serve the semantic function of adjectives are categorized together with some other class, such as nouns or verbs. In the phrase a Ford car, Ford is unquestionably a noun but its function is adjectival (noun adjunct, see below): to modify car.
In some languages adjectives can function as nouns: for example, the Spanish phrase means . This is also possible in English, see above. However, such nominalized adjectives mostly refer to people and are more commonly found in the plural: Reds or a Red (most commonly in the sense of ), the rich and the famous, the oppressed, the poorer or the poorest, or (not for people) (to venture into) the unknown, the obvious, etc., though use in the singular such as a poor (also the plural (the) poors unlike the poor) or a gay (less so (the) gays) is widely considered dated and generally avoided.
As for "confusion" with verbs, rather than an adjective meaning "big", a language might have a verb that means "to be big" and could then use an attributive verb construction analogous to "big-being house" to express what in English is called a "big house". Such an analysis is possible for the grammar of Standard Chinese and Korean, for example.
Different languages do not use adjectives in exactly the same situations. For example, where English uses "to be hungry" (hungry being an adjective), Dutch, French, and Spanish use "", "", and "" respectively (literally "to have hunger", the words for "hunger" being nouns). Similarly, where Hebrew uses the adjective (, roughly "in need of" or "needing"), English uses the verb "to need".
In languages that have adjectives as a word class, it is usually an open class; that is, it is relatively common for new adjectives to be formed via such processes as derivation. However, Bantu languages are well known for having only a small closed class of adjectives, and new adjectives are not easily derived. Similarly, native Japanese adjectives (i-adjectives) are considered a closed class (as are native verbs), although nouns (an open class) may be used in the genitive to convey some adjectival meanings, and there is also the separate open class of adjectival nouns (na-adjectives).
Adverbs Many languages (including English) distinguish between adjectives, which qualify nouns and pronouns, and adverbs, which mainly modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. Not all languages make this exact distinction; many (including English) have words that can function as either. For example, in English, fast is an adjective in "a fast car" (where it qualifies the noun car) but an adverb in "he drove fast" (where it modifies the verb drove).
In Dutch and German, adjectives and adverbs are usually identical in form and many grammarians do not make the distinction, but patterns of inflection can suggest a difference:
A clever new idea.
A cleverly developed idea. A German word like ("clever(ly)") takes endings when used as an attributive adjective but not when used adverbially. Whether these are distinct parts of speech or distinct usages of the same part of speech is a question of analysis. While German linguistic terminology distinguishes from , German refers to both as ("property words").
Determiners
Linguists today distinguish determiners from adjectives, considering them to be two separate parts of speech (or lexical categories). Determiners formerly were considered to be adjectives in some of their uses. Determiners function neither as nouns nor pronouns but instead characterize a nominal element within a particular context. They generally do this by indicating definiteness (a vs. the), quantity (one vs. some vs. many), or another such property.
Adjective phrases
An adjective acts as the head of an adjective phrase or adjectival phrase (AP). In the simplest case, an adjective phrase consists solely of the adjective; more complex adjective phrases may contain one or more adverbs modifying the adjective ("very strong"), or one or more complements (such as "worth several dollars", "full of toys", or "eager to please"). In English, attributive adjective phrases that include complements typically follow the noun that they qualify ("an evildoer devoid of redeeming qualities").
Other modifiers of nouns In many languages (including English) it is possible for nouns to modify other nouns. Unlike adjectives, nouns acting as modifiers (called attributive nouns or noun adjuncts) usually are not predicative; a beautiful park is beautiful, but a car park is not "car". The modifier often indicates origin ("Virginia reel"), purpose ("work clothes"), semantic patient ("man eater") or semantic subject ("child actor"); however, it may generally indicate almost any semantic relationship. It is also common for adjectives to be derived from nouns, as in boyish, birdlike, behavioral (behavioural), famous, manly, angelic, and so on.
Many languages have participle forms that can act as noun modifiers either alone or as the head of a phrase. Sometimes participles develop into functional usage as adjectives. Examples in English include relieved (the past participle of relieve), used as an adjective in passive voice constructs such as "I am so relieved to see you". Other examples include spoken (the past participle of speak) and going (the present participle of go), which function as attribute adjectives in such phrases as "the spoken word" and "the going rate".
Other constructs that often modify nouns include prepositional phrases (as in "a rebel without a cause"), relative clauses (as in "the man who wasn't there"), and infinitive phrases (as in "a cake to die for"). Some nouns can also take complements such as content clauses (as in "the idea that I would do that"), but these are not commonly considered modifiers. For more information about possible modifiers and dependents of nouns, see Components of noun phrases.
Distinction between nouns and adjectives In Australian Aboriginal languages, the distinction between adjectives and nouns is typically thought weak, and many of the languages only use nouns, or nouns with a limited set of adjective-deriving affixes, to modify other nouns. In languages that have a subtle adjective-noun distinction, one way to tell them apart is that a modifying adjective can come to stand in for an entire elided noun phrase, while a modifying noun cannot. For example, in Bardi, the adjective moorrooloo in the phrase moorrooloo baawa can stand on its own to mean , while the attributive noun aamba in the phrase aamba baawa cannot stand for the whole phrase to mean . 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.Order of adjectives, British Council.R.M.W. Dixon, "Where Have all the Adjectives Gone?" Studies in Language 1, no. 1 (1977): 19–80. Other language authorities, like the Cambridge Dictionary, state that shape precedes rather than follows age.Adjectives: order (from English Grammar Today), in the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary onlineR. Declerck, A Comprehensive Descriptive Grammar of English (1991), p. 350: "When there are several descriptive adjectives, they normally occur in the following order: characteristic – size – shape – age – colour – [...]"
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)