Adjectives in English
Which adjectives don’t grade and compare. Their sentence functions.
Adjective is a speech part determining nouns. They answer the question What kind? There’re common/descriptive and proper/personality adjectives. Multi-root adjectives are compound. Adjectives make description more specific.
Mexican food
faraway land
Take a larger slice of the luscious cake.
Qualitative Adjectives
Semantically adjectives may be qualitative or relative. Qualitative adjectives describe objects directly by denoting their shape, size, color or other general characteristics.
pretty, low, complete, round, good
Some qualitative adjectives are intensifiers. They emphasize object meanings, determined only by absolutely/really:
certain, sure, pure, sheer, real, undoubted, complete, extreme, great, perfect, mere, close, utter, entire, wonderful, terrible, astonished, delicious, amazing, hilarious
Relative adjectives
Relative adjectives describe objects indirectly, through their relations to other objects.
woolen, wooden, silver
They’re non-gradable – can’t be determined by very, too, enough. Intensifiers are non-gradable too.
weekly, unconscious, dead, legal, medical, empty, full
Attribute Adjectives
Syntactically adjectives may be attributive and predicative. Attributive adjectives come before nouns.
intelligent young woman
Some adjectives are historically attributive:
chief, main, only, particular, principal, sole
Predicative Adjectives
Predicate adjectives are separated from nouns and come after verbs, especially link verbs (be, get, seem, appear, keep, look, feel, make, smell, sound, taste, become, grow, remain, stay, turn).
Chicken made this way tastes more delicious.
Some adjectives are historically predicative:
ill, poorly, fine, asleep, awake, afraid, alive, alone, content, glad, pleased, sorry, upset, near, far (away)
The adjectives old, heavy, late may mean differently as attributive or predicative.
Kelly’s quite old now.
She’s a really old friend.
Comparison
Qualitative adjectives may have 3 comparison degrees as positive adjectives, comparative adjectives and superlative adjectives.
Adjective Formation
Many adjectives have affixes.
Frequent adjective suffixes:
-able/ible (able to be): comfortable
-ful (full of): beautiful
-less (without): careless
-ive (tending to): attractive
Negative prefixes:
dis-: dishonest
un-: uninteresting
il-: illegal
im-: impolite
in-: inconvenient
ir-: irrelevant