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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]
English adjectives form a large open category of words in English which, semantically, tend to denote properties such as size, colour, mood, quality, age, ...
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.)
Linguistic description is often contrasted with linguistic prescription, [8] which is found especially in education and in publishing. [9] [10]As English-linguist Larry Andrews describes it, descriptive grammar is the linguistic approach which studies what a language is like, as opposed to prescriptive, which declares what a language should be like.
Nouns are also created by converting verbs and adjectives, as with the words talk and reading (a boring talk, the assigned reading). Nouns are sometimes classified semantically (by their meanings) as proper and common nouns (Cyrus, China vs frog, milk) or as concrete and abstract nouns (book, laptop vs embarrassment, prejudice). [4]
The post-central zone includes participles and color terms. The pre-head zone includes adjectives denoting provenance, adjectives with the meaning of "relating to (noun)" (such as annual and political), and nouns. [51] The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language proposes two zones: early pre-head modifiers and residual pre-head modifiers.
An epithet (from Ancient Greek ἐπίθετον (epítheton) 'adjective', from ἐπίθετος (epíthetos) 'additional'), [1] also a byname, is a descriptive term (word or phrase) commonly accompanying or occurring in place of the name of a real or fictitious person, place, or thing.
In the philosophy of language, the descriptivist theory of proper names (also descriptivist theory of reference) [1] is the view that the meaning or semantic content of a proper name is identical to the descriptions associated with it by speakers, while their referents are determined to be the objects that satisfy these descriptions.