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An adjective (abbreviated adj.) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase.Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main parts of speech of the English language, although historically they were classed together with nouns. [1]
So can those ending in -ch / -tch (e.g. "the French", "the Dutch") provided they are pronounced with a 'ch' sound (e.g. the adjective Czech does not qualify). Many place-name adjectives and many demonyms are also used for various other things, sometimes with and sometimes without one or more additional words.
Adjectives may be formed by the addition of affixes to a base from another category of words. For example, the noun recreation combines with the suffix -al to form the adjective recreational. Prefixes of this type include a-+ noun (blaze → ablaze) and non-+ noun (stop → non-stop).
English adjectives, as with other word classes, cannot in general be identified as such by their form, [24] although many of them are formed from nouns or other words by the addition of a suffix, such as -al (habitual), -ful (blissful), -ic (atomic), -ish (impish, youngish), -ous (hazardous), etc.; or from other adjectives using a prefix ...
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.
Where an adjective is a link, the link is to the language or dialect of the same name. Many place-name adjectives and many demonyms also refer to various other things, sometimes with and sometimes without one or more additional words. Additionally, sometimes the use of one or more additional words is optional.
In other cases, the complement may have the form of an adjective or adjective phrase, or an adverbial. This may be regarded as a complement representing a different syntactic category, or simply as an atypical form of noun phrase (see nominalization). The scene went from blindingly bright to pitch black (complements are adjective phrases)
Sometimes deverbal adjectives additionally take prefixes, as in hand-fed turkeys, uneaten food and meat-eating animals. Some compound adjectives are formed using the plain infinitive form of the verb, as in a no-go area or no-fly zone, [2] and take-away food. Occasionally they are finite verb phrases: a must-see movie; their can-do attitude.