Adjectives  

Adjectives are used almost exclusively to modify nouns, as well as any phrase or part of speech functioning as a noun. For example:

Adjectives are broken down into two basic syntactic categories: attributive and predicative.

Adjectives that appear directly before (or sometimes directly after) the noun or pronoun they modify are known as attributive adjectives. These can appear anywhere in a sentence, and can modify parts of either the subject or the predicate.

Predicative adjectives, on the other hand, always appear after the noun they modify, connected to it by a linking verb. They are one of the three types of subject complements, and they are always part of the predicate—hence their name.

Let’s compare two examples to highlight this difference:

In the first sentence, black is an attributive adjective. It is part of the noun phrase and is not connected to the noun dog by a linking verb. In the second sentence, though, black is a predicative adjective. It follows dog, the noun that it modifies, and is connected to it by the linking verb was.

While adjectives usually modify nouns, they can also modify pronouns. This most commonly occurs when adjectives are predicative. For example:

Attributive adjectives can also modify indefinite pronouns, as in:

In informal speech or writing, it is not uncommon to modify personal pronouns attributively, as in:

However, avoid using attributive adjectives with personal pronouns in anything other than casual conversation or writing.

There is a huge variety of adjectives in English. While many words are inherently adjectival, such as colors (red, black, yellow, etc.) or characteristics (strong, weak, nice, etc.), there are also several categories of adjectives that are formed from other sources. The table below gives a brief breakdown of these different categories of adjectives, along with some examples of how they are used in a sentence. Go to each individual section to learn more.

In addition to the single-word adjectives we looked at above, we can also use adjective phrases and relative clauses (also called adjective clauses) to modify nouns. We’ll look at both briefly below, but to learn more about how they are formed and used, go to their respective sections in this chapter.

An adjective phrase is an adjective and any additional information linked to it that work together to describe a noun or pronoun in a sentence. This additional information can include determiners or adverbial modifiers.

The adjective around which an adjective phrase is formed is known as the head word or head adjective of the phrase.

Adjective phrases can be either attributive (appearing before the nouns they modify) or predicative (appearing after a linking verb)

For example:

Note that prepositional phrases can also function as adjectives. These are considered adjectival phrases rather than true adjective phrases, because there is not a head adjective at the root of the phrase. Adjectival prepositional phrases always appear directly after the noun they modify.

For example:

Relative clauses (also known as adjective or adjectival clauses) are dependent clauses that provide descriptive information about a noun or noun phrase. If the information it presents is essential to the meaning of the sentence, it is known as a restrictive clause; if it is extra information that is not essential, it is known as a non-restrictive clause.

Relative clauses are introduced by either relative pronouns or relative adverbs. Unlike attributive adjectives, they always appear directly after the noun they modify.

For example:

We often use multiple adjectives to modify the same noun or pronoun. Note that these are not compound adjectives or adjective phrases, but rather individual adjectives that work independently to modify the same word.

To avoid unnatural-sounding sentences when we use more than one adjective in this way, we put them in a specific order according to the type of description they provide. This is known as the order of adjectives:

While we would almost never use a sentence with so many adjectives in a row, it’s very common to use two or three. In this case, we generally must follow the order above, as in:

Note that in some circumstances we separate adjectives with commas and/or the coordinating conjunction and, while in other cases we use them without any separation at all. To learn more about the rules that determine this, go to the section on the Order of Adjectives later in this chapter.

We can also use adjectives to create comparisons between two or more people or things, or to identify someone or something with the highest (or lowest) degree of some quality. To do this, we inflect (change the form of) the adjective to create comparative adjectives or superlative adjectives. For example:

This process of changing an adjective’s form is known as the Degrees of Comparison; go to that section in this chapter to learn more.

Adjectives and determiners both provide extra information about a noun (or pronoun). But while adjectives provide descriptive, modifying information about a noun, determiners are used to introduce and specify a noun.

The most common determiners are the articles the and a/an. These indicate whether a noun is specific or general (i.e., the book vs. a book). Numbers can also act as determiners, as in three books, 10 books, 1000 books, etc.

However, there are a number of categories of adjectives that are also considered to be types of determiners because they share the features of both:

Demonstratives and interrogatives are more commonly classed as adjectives, while possessives and distributives are more commonly classed as determiners. Quantifiers are harder to distinguish, but, for the purposes of this guide, they are covered in the chapter on Determiners.