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The normal adjectival order of English may be overridden in certain circumstances, especially when one adjective is being fronted or with ablaut reduplication. For example, the usual order of adjectives in English would result in the phrase "the bad big wolf" (opinion before size), but instead, the usual phrase is "the big bad wolf".
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, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language categorizes this use of that as an adverb. This analysis is supported by the fact that other pre-head modifiers of adjectives that "intensify" their meaning tend to be adverbs, such as awfully in awfully sorry and too in too bright. [18]: 445–447
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 .
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)
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 ...
For example, the English prepositional phrase with (his) foot (as in "John kicked the ball with his foot") might be rendered in Russian using a single noun in the instrumental case, or in Ancient Greek as τῷ ποδί (tôi podí, meaning "the foot") with both words (the definite article, and the noun πούς (poús) "foot") changing to ...
A collateral adjective is an adjective that is identified with a particular noun in meaning, but that is not derived from that noun. For example, the word bovine is considered the adjectival equivalent for the noun cattle, but it is derived from a different word, which happens to be the Latin word for "cattle" (n.b. the collateral adjective for cow as specifically restricted to adult female ...