Adjective
Adjectives
modify or describe features and qualities of people, animals and things
represented by nouns and pronouns. Adjectives describe nouns by giving some
information about an object’s size, shape, age, color, origin or material.
When an
adjective is used with a noun, the usual order is “adjective + noun”: a yellow
balloon
That’s a big house.
Look at the grey horse.
All dogs have tails, but some
dogs have long tails.
Adjectives
can go before the noun (attributive) or after linking verbs such as be, become,
seem (predicative):
What a beautiful flower!
(attributive)
This bridge looks unsafe.
(predicative)
With
numbers and with words like first, last, next, the usual order is “first/next +
number + adjective + noun”:
I don’t have to work for the
next four days.
That’s the second large study
on unemployment this year.
Most
commonly, the adjectives “ill” and “well” are used after a verb and not before
a noun:
I feel ill.
Most
common adjectives are members of a pair of opposites:
Beautiful –
ugly, dead – alive, happy – sad, rough – smooth, big – small, dry – wet, heavy –
light, tall – short, cold – hot, good – bad
The place of attribute:
Attributes
expressed by adjectives (or by pronouns, participles, numerals, nouns in the
possessive case) usually stand before their nouns, before the noun in the
subject, in the object, or in the adverbial modifier.
My old dog liked fresh apples.
We threw out several
broken chairs.
The doctor's new house is near a large park.
If there
are several adjectives before a noun, a more specific adjective is placed
closer to its noun than a more general adjective.
She bought a nice green
woolen sweater.
Chicago is a beautiful big
clean city.
My daughter likes soft
gray, green, and blue colors.
Attributes
in the form of a noun with a preposition or structures with participles are
placed after the noun that they modify.
Chicago is a big city in
the Midwest.
The waiter threw out the
chairs broken in yesterday's fight.
Before
adjectives you will normally have “Determiner”. Determiner tells us if the noun
is singular or plural, definite or indefinite: a, an, the, my, your, four,
those, some etc.
As a
general rule, adjectives are usually placed in this order: Opinion, size,
quality, age, shape, colour, participle forms, origin, material type, purpose.
Claudia is going camping with
three other little girls.
I bought a beautiful long red
Italian silk tie.
