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An adjective phrase is a group of words that plays the role of an adjective in a sentence. It usually has a single adjective as its head, to which modifiers and complements may be added. [26] Adjectives can be modified by a preceding adverb or adverb phrase, as in very warm, truly imposing, more than a little excited.
Such adjective phrases can be integrated into the clause (e.g., Love dies young) or detached from the clause as a supplement (e.g., Happy to see her, I wept). Adjective phrases functioning as predicative adjuncts are typically interpreted with the subject of the main clause being the predicand of the adjunct (i.e., "I was happy to see her"). [11]
Differences in scale are important to this meaning: for example, English grammar could describe those rules followed by every one of the language's speakers. [2] At smaller scales, it may refer to rules shared by smaller groups of speakers. A description, study, or analysis of such rules may also be known as a grammar, or as a grammar book.
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 ...
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, 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.
The English modal auxiliary verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality, properties such as possibility and obligation. [a] They can most easily be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participles or plain forms [b]) and by their lack of the ending ‑(e)s for the third-person singular.
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 ...