It is known that an adjective denotes a property of some referent ex­pressed by a noun. The property may be that of material, colour, size, position, state, and other characteristics both permanent and temporary. It fol­lows from this that, unlike nouns, adjectives do not possess a full nomina­tive value. The semantically bound character of the […]

The main syntactic function of adjectives is that of an attribute. As a rule, attributes expressed by adjectives precede nouns that are modified. However, attributes may also occur in a post-position, which gives them additional emphasis: A plastic ball, in white and yellow stripes, rolled softly and with decep­tive slowness from one dry tuft of […]

The English adjective has lost in the course of history all its forms of grammatical agreement with the noun. As a result, the only paradigmatic forms of the adjective are those of degrees of comparison. The meaning of the category of comparison is expression of different degrees of intensity of some property revealed by comparing […]

Adjectives as a rule have a suffixational structure and, on the ground of their derivational pattern, are divided into base adjectives and derived adjectives. Base adjectives are usually monosyllabic, which influences their formal qualities: they form the degrees of comparison by taking inflections -er and -est or by undergoing morphophonemic changes, i.e. they have developed […]

The Adjective is a part of speech with the categorical meaning of a rela­tively permanent property of a substance: a thick book, a beautiful city. The adjective denotes a property that does not evolve in time and it is this static character that is meant under the notion of relative permanence: cf. high quality and […]

Fairly obviously word order is an alternative to case marking in distin­guishing subject from object in English, as well as in languages like Thai, Vietnamese, and Indonesian, all of which use the Subject-Verb-Object or­der as their unmarked option. In English the word order also distinguishes the patient object (i.e. direct object) from the recipient or […]

Since the late 1960s a number of theories have been put forward claim­ing that the semantic relationships borne by nominal parts of speech to verbs make up a small, universal set. Since obviously there is a great deal of vari­ation between languages as to how many cases they have, the semantic rela­tionships that are posited […]