Demonstratives. Now that we've had an introduction to nouns and adjectives, we can almost make complete phrases like "the old man" or "the good woman". The only thing we're missing are words like "the". Consider the following expressionthis man that manthese men those men The words "this", "these", "that", and "those" are obviously telling you something more about "man" or "men ". They are indicating the spacial location "man" or "men " have relative to the speaker. When we say "this man" or the plural "these men", we are referring to the man or men which are nearby: "this man right here"; "these men right here". For the most part, when we say "that man" or "those men", we mean men which are some distance from us: "that man over there", or "those men over there". It would sound odd for someone to say "that man right here" or "these men way over there". So the words "this", "these", "that", and "those", are telling us more about the words they're attached to; that is, they qualify or modify their nouns. And we call words which modify other nouns "adjectives".
