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Although English adjectives do not participate in the system of number the way determiners, nouns, and pronouns do, English adjectives may still express number semantically. For example, adjectives like several, various, and multiple are semantically plural, while those like single, lone, and unitary have singular semantics. [31]
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.
An eponymous adjective is an adjective which has been derived from the name of a person, real or fictional. Persons from whose name the adjectives have been derived are called eponyms. [1] Following is a list of eponymous adjectives in English.
For example, the lexeme be (as in to be) comprises all its conjugations (is, was, am, are, were, etc.), and contractions of those conjugations. [5] These top 100 lemmas listed below account for 50% of all the words in the Oxford English Corpus. [1]
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 .
Most capitalized adjectives derive from proper nouns; for example, the proper adjective American derives from the proper noun America. Sometimes, an adjective is capitalized because it designates an ethnic group with a shared culture, heritage, or ancestry. This usage asserts the existence of a unified group with common goals.
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 ...
The key difference between adjectives and determiners in English is that adjectives cannot function as determinatives. The determinative function is an element in NPs that is obligatory in most singular countable NPs and typically occurs before any modifiers (see § Functions ).