Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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]
For example, the adjective carnivorous is intersective, given the extension of carnivorous mammal is the intersection of the extensions of carnivorous and mammal (i.e., the set of all mammals who are carnivorous). An adjective is subsective if and only if the extension of its combination with a noun is a subset of the extension of the noun.
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.)
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 eponymous adjective is an adjective which has been derived from the name of a person, real or fictional. Persons from whose name the adjectives have been derived are called eponyms. [1] Following is a list of eponymous adjectives in English.
A famous example for lexical ambiguity is the following sentence: "Wenn hinter Fliegen Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen hinterher.", meaning "When flies fly behind flies, then flies fly in pursuit of flies." [40] [circular reference] It takes advantage of some German nouns and corresponding verbs being homonymous. While not noticeable ...
Words that function as compound adjectives may modify a noun or a noun phrase.Take the English examples heavy metal detector and heavy-metal detector.The former example contains only the bare adjective heavy to describe a device that is properly written as metal detector; the latter example contains the phrase heavy-metal, which is a compound noun that is ordinarily rendered as heavy metal ...
Modal adjectives can express modality regarding a situation or a participant in that situation. With situations, some usual syntactic patterns include an extraposed subject, [3] such as the underlined elements in the following examples with the modal adjective in bold. Here the modal adjective is analyzed semantically as a sentential modal ...