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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]
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]
The distinguishing characteristic of an attributive adjective phrase is that it appears inside the noun phrase that it modifies. [2] An interesting trait of these phrases in English is that an attributive adjective alone generally precedes the noun, e.g. a proud man, whereas a head-initial or head-medial adjective phrase follows its noun, e.g. a man proud of his children. [3]
Number is inherent to the noun so it is reflected by inflection on the noun and the agreeing nominals such as attributive adjectives, predicates and relative pronouns. There is only alteration of singular and plural between semantic classes 2–5 because class 1 does not distinguish between one or more than one. [4] Adjectives
In grammar, an attributive expression is a word or phrase within a noun phrase that modifies the head noun. It may be an: attributive adjective; attributive noun; attributive verb; or other part of speech, such as an attributive numeral.
So can those ending in -ch / -tch (e.g. "the French", "the Dutch") provided they are pronounced with a 'ch' sound (e.g. the adjective Czech does not qualify). Many place-name adjectives and many demonyms are also used for various other things, sometimes with and sometimes without one or more additional words.
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 ...
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 ...