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Agreement also occurs between nouns and their specifier and modifiers, in some situations. This is common in languages such as French and Spanish, where articles, determiners and adjectives (both attributive and predicative) agree in number with the nouns they qualify: le grand homme ("the great man") vs. les grands hommes ("the great men")
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]
There are also many adverbs that are not derived from adjectives, [27] including adverbs of time, of frequency, of place, of degree and with other meanings. Some suffixes that are commonly used to form adverbs from nouns are -ward[s] (as in homeward[s]) and -wise (as in lengthwise). Adverbs are also formed by adding -ly to the participles.
With the adjective as a modifier in a noun phrase, the adjective and the noun typically receive equal stress (a black bird), but in a compound, the adjective typically takes primary word stress (a blackbird). Only a small set of English adjectives function in this way: [37] The colour words black, blue, brown, green, grey, red, and white
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 ...
An adjective never has to agree with the noun it modifies, but adjectives may be pluralized when there is no explicit noun to modify. le parve infantes 'the little children'; but le parves 'the little ones' Comparative degree is expressed by plus or minus preceding the adjective and superlative degree by le plus or le minus.
The decline in the use of adjectives as nouns may be attributed to the loss of adjectival inflection throughout Middle English. In line with the Minimalist Framework elaborated by Noam Chomsky, [2] it is suggested that inflected adjectives are more likely to be nominalized because they have overtly-marked φ-features (such as grammatical number and gender), which makes them suitable for use as ...
The comparative degrees are frequently associated with adjectives and adverbs because these words take the -er suffix or modifying word more or less. (e.g., faster, more intelligent, less wasteful). Comparison can also, however, appear when no adjective or adverb is present, for instance with nouns (e.g., more men than women).