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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]
Many common suffixes form nouns from other nouns or from other types of words, such as -age (shrinkage), -hood (sisterhood), and so on, [3] though many nouns are base forms containing no such suffix (cat, grass, France). Nouns are also created by converting verbs and adjectives, as with the words talk and reading (a boring talk, the assigned ...
Common nouns are defined as those that are neither proper nouns nor pronouns. [9] They are the most numerous and the most frequently used in English. Common nouns can be further divided into count and non-count nouns. A count noun can take a number as its determiner (e.g., -20 degrees, zero calories, one cat, two bananas, 276 dollars).
Noun adjuncts (nouns qualifying another noun) also generally come before the nouns they modify: in a phrase like book club, the adjunct (modifier) book comes before the head (modified noun) club. By contrast, prepositional phrases , adverbs of location, etc., as well as relative clauses , come after the nouns they modify: the elephant in the ...
As a noun, desert is a barren or uninhabited place; an older meaning of the word is "what one deserves", as in the idiom just deserts. A dessert is the last course of a meal. disassemble and dissemble. To disassemble means "to dismantle" (e.g., to take a machine code program apart to see how it works); to dissemble means "to tell lies".
An adjective comes before the noun it modifies in its unmarked position. However, the possessive and reflexive pronominal adjectives can occur either to the left or to the right of the noun it describes. Negation must come either to the left or to the right of the verb it negates. For compound verbs or verbal construction using auxiliaries the ...
A proper noun (sometimes called a proper name, though the two terms normally have different meanings) is a noun that represents a unique entity (India, Pegasus, Jupiter, Confucius, Pequod) – as distinguished from common nouns (or appellative nouns), which describe a class of entities (country, animal, planet, person, ship). [11]
English adjectives head phrases that typically function as pre-head modifiers of nouns or predicative complements (e.g., those nice folks seem quite capable) while English nouns head phrases that can function as subjects, or objects in verb phrases or preposition phrases (e.g., [Jess] told [my sister] [a story] about [cute animals]).