2018-05-21 - Parts of Speech: Adjectives

Parts of Speech

• Part 1 - Introduction
• Part 2 - Nouns
• Part 3 - Verbs
• Part 4 - Pronouns
• Part 5 - Articles
• Part 6 - Adjectives
• Part 7 - Determiner
• Part 8 - Adverbs

Adjectives are words attached to nouns to provide extra information about them. There are a large variety of adjectives and a wide variety of uses for adjectives. Last time we looked at articles which are a type of adjective that helps to provide information about which instance of a noun is being referred to. Adjectives can also be used to provide information about the colour of a noun, i.e. "The green frog", or the size of a noun, i.e. "The big frog". These are called descriptive adjectives compared to articles and other adjective types which serve more to identify the particular noun being referred.

Adjectives can be combined to but the rules about adjective order differ based on the language being used and mainly come down to what sounds right. For example it sounds better to say "The big green frog" as compared to the "The green big frog". Generally articles or other identifier nouns go first and then descriptive adjectives as necessary.

Some adjectives can also be used for comparisons. This is expressed using the comparative form or superlative form. The comparative is usually created by adding the suffix -er to the word or by adding the words more or less before it. The superlative is usually created by adding the suffix -est to the word or by adding the words most or least before it. Like the order of adjectives the rules about how the comparison forms are created are not very well defined. The word forms are almost always acceptable but the suffix form depends on the adjective.

Next we will look at special types of adjectives.