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Although English adjectives do not participate in the system of number the way determiners, nouns, and pronouns do, English adjectives may still express number semantically. For example, adjectives like several, various, and multiple are semantically plural, while those like single, lone, and unitary have singular semantics. [31]
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).
Many place-name adjectives and many demonyms are also used for various other things, sometimes with and sometimes without one or more additional words. (Sometimes, the use of one or more additional words is optional.) Notable examples are cuisines, cheeses, cat breeds, dog breeds, and horse breeds. (See List of words derived from toponyms.)
The adjectives good and bad have the irregular forms better, best and worse, worst; also far becomes farther, farthest or further, furthest. The adjective old (for which the regular older and oldest are usual) also has the irregular forms elder and eldest, these generally being restricted to use in comparing siblings and in
Revel the night, rob, murder, and commit / The oldest sins the newest kind of ways? Henry IV Part 2, act 4 scene 5. A noun can co-occur with an article or an attributive adjective. Verbs and adjectives cannot. In the following, an asterisk (*) in front of an example means that this example is ungrammatical.
For example, because martial is a postpositive adjective in the phrase court-martial, the plural is courts-martial, the suffix being attached to the noun rather than the adjective. This pattern holds for most postpositive adjectives, with the few exceptions reflecting overriding linguistic processes such as rebracketing .
An example is land in the phrase land mines given above. Examples of the above types of modifiers, in English, are given below. It was [a nice house]. (adjective modifying a noun, in a noun phrase) [The swiftly flowing waters] carried it away. (adjectival phrase, in this case a participial phrase, modifying a noun in a noun phrase)
For example, one effect of the English derivational suffix -ly is to change an adjective into an adverb (slow → slowly). Here are examples of English derivational patterns and their suffixes: adjective-to-noun: -ness (slow → slowness) adjective-to-verb: -en (weak → weaken) adjective-to-adjective: -ish (red → reddish)