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Adject

The document discusses the usage of adjectives in various languages, highlighting their classification into prepositive, postpositive, and nominalized forms. It also explains the distinction between adjectives and adverbs, as well as the role of determiners and adjective phrases. Additionally, it notes the differences in how nouns can modify other nouns across languages and the weak distinction between adjectives and nouns in some languages.

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3 views

Adject

The document discusses the usage of adjectives in various languages, highlighting their classification into prepositive, postpositive, and nominalized forms. It also explains the distinction between adjectives and adverbs, as well as the role of determiners and adjective phrases. Additionally, it notes the differences in how nouns can modify other nouns across languages and the weak distinction between adjectives and nouns in some languages.

Uploaded by

magzmagz96
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Types of use

[edit]
Depending on the language, an adjective can precede a corresponding noun on a
prepositive basis or it can follow a corresponding noun on a postpositive basis.
Structural, contextual, and style considerations can impinge on the pre-or post-position
of an adjective in a given instance of its occurrence. In English, occurrences of
adjectives generally can be classified into one of three categories:

 Prepositive adjectives, which are also known as "attributive adjectives", occur on an


antecedent basis within noun phrases.[6] For example: "I put my happy kids into the
car", wherein happy occurs on an antecedent basis within the my happy kids noun
phrase, and therefore functions in a prepositive adjective.
 Postpositive adjectives can occur: immediately subsequent to a noun within a noun
phrase, e.g. "The only room available cost twice what we expected"; as linked via
a copula or other linking mechanism subsequent to a corresponding noun or
pronoun; for example: "My kids are happy", wherein happy is a predicate
adjective[6] (see also: Predicative expression, Subject complement); or as an
appositive adjective within a noun phrase, e.g. "My kids, [who are] happy to go for a
drive, are in the back seat."
 Nominalized adjectives, which function as nouns. One way this happens is
by eliding a noun from an adjective-noun noun phrase, whose remnant thus is
a nominalization. In the sentence, "I read two books to them; he preferred the sad
book, but she preferred the happy", happy is a nominalized adjective, short for
"happy one" or "happy book". Another way this happens is in phrases like "out with
the old, in with the new", where "the old" means "that which is old" or "all that is old",
and similarly with "the new". In such cases, the adjective may function as a mass
noun (as in the preceding example). In English, it may also function as a plural count
noun denoting a collective group, as in "The meek shall inherit the Earth", where
"the meek" means "those who are meek" or "all who are meek".
Distribution
[edit]
Adjectives feature as a part of speech (word class) in most languages. In some
languages, the words that serve the semantic function of adjectives are categorized
together with some other class, such as nouns or verbs. In the phrase "a Ford car",
"Ford" is unquestionably a noun but its function is adjectival: to modify "car". In some
languages adjectives can function as nouns: for example, the Spanish phrase "un rojo"
means "a red [one]".

As for "confusion" with verbs, rather than an adjective meaning "big", a language might
have a verb that means "to be big" and could then use an attributive verb construction
analogous to "big-being house" to express what in English is called a "big house". Such
an analysis is possible for the grammar of Standard Chinese and Korean, for example.
Different languages do not use adjectives in exactly the same situations. For example,
where English uses "to be hungry" (hungry being an adjective), Dutch, French,
and Spanish use "honger hebben", "avoir faim", and "tener hambre" respectively
(literally "to have hunger", the words for "hunger" being nouns). Similarly, where Hebrew
uses the adjective ‫( זקוק‬zaqūq, roughly "in need of" or "needing"), English uses the
verb "to need".

In languages that have adjectives as a word class, it is usually an open class; that is, it
is relatively common for new adjectives to be formed via such processes as derivation.
However, Bantu languages are well known for having only a small closed class of
adjectives, and new adjectives are not easily derived. Similarly, native Japanese
adjectives (i-adjectives) are considered a closed class (as are native verbs), although
nouns (an open class) may be used in the genitive to convey some adjectival meanings,
and there is also the separate open class of adjectival nouns (na-adjectives).

Adverbs
[edit]
Many languages (including English) distinguish between adjectives, which qualify nouns
and pronouns, and adverbs, which mainly modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs.
Not all languages make this exact distinction; many (including English) have words that
can function as either. For example, in English, fast is an adjective in "a fast car" (where
it qualifies the noun car) but an adverb in "he drove fast" (where it modifies the
verb drove).

In Dutch and German, adjectives and adverbs are usually identical in form and many
grammarians do not make the distinction, but patterns of inflection can suggest a
difference:

Eine kluge neue Idee.


A clever new idea.
Eine klug ausgereifte Idee.
A cleverly developed idea.
A German word like klug ("clever(ly)") takes endings when used as an attributive
adjective but not when used adverbially. Whether these are distinct parts of
speech or distinct usages of the same part of speech is a question of analysis.
While German linguistic terminology distinguishes adverbiale from adjektivische
Formen, German refers to both as Eigenschaftswörter ("property words").

Determiners
[edit]
Main article: Determiner
Linguists today distinguish determiners from adjectives, considering them to be
two separate parts of speech (or lexical categories). Determiners formerly were
considered to be adjectives in some of their uses.[a] Determiners function neither
as nouns nor pronouns but instead characterize a nominal element within a
particular context. They generally do this by
indicating definiteness (a vs. the), quantity (one vs. some vs. many), or another
such property.

Adjective phrases
[edit]
Main article: Adjective phrase
An adjective acts as the head of an adjective phrase or adjectival phrase (AP). In
the simplest case, an adjective phrase consists solely of the adjective; more
complex adjective phrases may contain one or more adverbs modifying the
adjective ("very strong"), or one or more complements (such as "worth several
dollars", "full of toys", or "eager to please"). In English, attributive adjective
phrases that include complements typically follow the noun that they qualify ("an
evildoer devoid of redeeming qualities").

Other modifiers of nouns


[edit]
In many languages (including English) it is possible for nouns to modify other
nouns. Unlike adjectives, nouns acting as modifiers (called attributive
nouns or noun adjuncts) usually are not predicative; a beautiful park is beautiful,
but a car park is not "car". The modifier often indicates origin ("Virginia reel"),
purpose ("work clothes"), semantic patient ("man eater") or
semantic subject ("child actor"); however, it may generally indicate almost any
semantic relationship. It is also common for adjectives to be derived from nouns,
as in boyish, birdlike, behavioral (behavioural), famous, manly, angelic, and so
on.

In Australian Aboriginal languages, the distinction between adjectives and nouns


is typically thought weak, and many of the languages only use nouns—or nouns
with a limited set of adjective-deriving affixes—to modify other nouns. In
languages that have a subtle adjective-noun distinction, one way to tell them
apart is that a modifying adjective can come to stand in for an entire elided noun
phrase, while a modifying noun cannot. For example, in Bardi, the
adjective moorrooloo 'little' in the phrase moorrooloo baawa 'little child' can stand
on its own to mean 'the little one,' while the attributive noun aamba 'man' in the
phrase aamba baawa 'male child' cannot stand for the whole phrase to mean
'the male one.'[7] In other languages, like Warlpiri, nouns and adjectives are
lumped together beneath the nominal umbrella because of their shared syntactic
distribution as arguments of predicates. The only thing distinguishing them is
that some nominals seem to semantically denote entities (typically nouns in
English) and some nominals seem to denote attributes (typically adjectives in
English).[8]

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