Key considerations

Learners are generally more concerned with the meaning of specific adjectives than with their grammar. When the grammar does cause problems, this is often related to:

• • ordering two or more adjectives that occur together.

• • constructing comparative and superlative forms.

• • deciding what words or combinations of words we can use directly before and after adjectives (e.g. where we can and can’t use very, where we can and can’t follow an adjective with an infinitive such as to eat).

What are adjectives?

What do they do?

Adjectives are often called ‘describing words’ because they provide information about the qualities of something described in a noun, a noun phrase or a noun clause.

Adjectives provide much of the ‘colour’ in any description, as the following passage illustrates. This text introduces the classic film ‘Deliverance’ to television viewers. The adjectives are printed in italics.

What do they look like?

Adjectives related to nouns or verbs

A lot of adjectives are closely related to nouns or verbs.

These adjectives often have one of the following endings or ‘suffixes’. Sometimes, as in the case of impeccable, the adjective survives long after the noun or verb it has been related to is forgotten.

We can attach the prefixes non-, pro- and anti- to the beginning of some nouns, and the suffixes -like and -friendly. to the end to create adjective forms (e.g. a pro-/anti-democracy movement, a business-like manner, a user-friendly computer manual).

Participle forms

In the following examples borin and bore are parts of the verb (to) bore.

Boring is the present participle and bored. is the past participle. Many adjectives have the same form as participles (e.g. boring, bored, broken, closed, exciting, excited)

Multiword adjectives

Multiword or ‘compound’ adjectives are made up of two parts (usually connected by a hyphen). The second part of multiword adjectives is often a past participle form.