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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]
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: adjective-to-noun: -ness (slow → slowness) adjective-to-verb: -en (weak → weaken) adjective-to-adjective: -ish (red → reddish)
The plural forms are usually -os and -as respectively. Adjectives ending in -ish can be used as collective demonyms (e.g. "the English", "the Cornish"). 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).
English adjectives, as with other word classes, cannot in general be identified as such by their form, [24] although many of them are formed from nouns or other words by the addition of a suffix, such as -al (habitual), -ful (blissful), -ic (atomic), -ish (impish, youngish), -ous (hazardous), etc.; or from other adjectives using a prefix ...
For example, the noun green in golf (referring to a putting-green) is derived ultimately from the adjective green. Conversions from adjectives to nouns and vice versa are both very common and unnotable in English; much more remarked upon is the creation of a verb by converting a noun or other word (for example, the adjective clean becomes the ...
It is not always the case in Bantu languages that the verb has noun agreement in the form of nominals, or in any form, but in Swahili it is a good representation of how these prefixes travel across the associated words. [2] In the first Swahili example, the noun has the prefix m-because it is part of
In noun phrases such as the boy actor, words like boy do not fall neatly into the categories noun or adjective. Boy is more like an adjective than a noun in that it functions as a pre-head modifier of a noun, which is a function prototypically filled by adjective phrases, and in that that it cannot be pluralized in this position (*the boys actor).