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Through a process of derivational morphology, adjectives may form words of other categories. For example, the adjective happy combines with the suffix -ness to form the noun happiness. It is typical of English adjectives to combine with the -ly suffix to become adverbs (e.g., real → really; encouraging → encouragingly). [b]
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]
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.
Inflection is the process of adding inflectional morphemes that modify a verb's tense, mood, aspect, voice, person, or number or a noun's case, gender, or number, rarely affecting the word's meaning or class. Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding -s to the root dog to form dogs and adding -ed to wait to form waited.
Such an affix usually applies to words of one lexical category (part of speech) and changes them into words of another such category. For example, one effect of the English derivational suffix -ly is to change an adjective into an adverb (slow → slowly). Here are examples of English derivational patterns and their suffixes:
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.
However the same verb-derived -ing forms are also sometimes used as pure nouns or adjectives. [5] In this case the word does not form a verb phrase; any modifiers it takes will be of a grammatical kind which is appropriate to a noun or adjective respectively. For example: Shouting loudly is rude. (shouting is a gerund, modified by the adverb ...
The compounds shown here are bare, but more commonly, a suffixal morpheme is added, such as -ed: a two-legged person is a person with two legs, and this is exocentric. On the other hand, endocentric adjectives are also frequently formed, using the suffixal morphemes -ing or -er/or.