Adjectives

Contents

Introduction___________________________________2
Part 1
1.1 Adjectives. ________________________________3
1.2 Degrees of Comparison ______________________3
1.3 Substantification of Adjectives. _______________6
1.4 Syntactic Functions of Adjectives.______________7
Part 2
2.1 Position of Adjectives________________________7
2.2 Order of Adjectives. _________________________9
2.3 Adjectives with prepositions. _________________11
2.4 Adjectives with ‘to’-infinitive or ‘that’-clauses ___13
Conclusion__________________________________17
Appendix ___________________________________19
Bibliography ________________________________20
Introduction


We have chosen this theme because we like adjectives from our early school age. It was interesting for us to investigate adjectives and to find something new that we didn’t know before. First of all we found out the basical definitions of adjectives to describe it as part of speech. We used many theoretical books to do our course work, such as: « Modern English language» (Theoretical course grammar) V.N. Zhigadlo, I.P. Ivanova, L.L. Iofik. Moscow, 1956 y., Baker, Mark. 2005. Lexical Categories - Verbs, nouns and adjectives. Cambridge University Press, etc. Then we looked through the “Warren, Beatrice. (1984). Classifying adjectives. Gothenburg studies in English” to know their theories and thoughts about adjectives as a part of speech. Here what we found about it:
In grammar, an adjective is a part of speech that modifies a noun or a pronoun, usually by describing it or making its meaning more specific. Adjectives exist in most languages. The most widely recognized adjectives in English are words such as big, old, and tired that actually describe people, places, or things. These words can themselves be modified with adverbs, as in the phrase very big.The articles a, an, and the and possessive nouns, such as Mary's, are classified as adjectives by some grammarians; however, such classification may be specific to one particular language. Other grammarians call such noun modifiers determiners. Similarly, possessive adjectives, such as his or her, are sometimes called determinative possessive pronouns, and demonstrative adjectives, such as this or that, are called determinative demonstratives.In some languages, participles are used as adjectives. Examples of participles used as adjectives are lingering in the phrase lingering headache and broken in the phrase broken toys. Nouns that modify other nouns are sometimes called modifying nouns, nouns used adjectivally, or just part of a compound noun (like the word ice in ice cream).
Adjectives.

According to the theories of Dixon, R. M. W. (1977). “Where have all the adjectives gone?” Studies in Language, 1, 19-80 :

Adjectives are the third major class of words in English, after nouns and verbs. Adjectives are words expressing properties of objects (e.g.large, blue, simple, clever, economic, progressive, productive, etc) and, hence, qualifying nouns.Adjectives in English do not change for number or case. The only grammatical category they have is the degrees of comparison. They are also characterized by functions in the sentence.