Week 5 - Adjectives and Determiners

Adjectives: Functions, Use and Degrees of Comparison.

This week we’ll be looking at adjectives. Adjectives modify nouns and pronouns. That is to say, they clarify, describe, delimit, expand, and qualify words they agree with.

Attributive adjectives can be placed before or after the word they modify. In English, attributive adjectives typically come before the noun—but not always.

Let’s have a look at some examples: In ‘the part-time teacher’ or the ‘happy goblin’, ‘part-time’ and ‘happy’ are attributive adjectives that come before the noun; in ‘proof positive’ or ‘the body corporate’, ‘positive’ and ‘corporate’ are attributive adjectives that come after the nouns that they are modifying.

Predicative adjectives come after linking verbs, such as the verbs ‘to be’, ‘to become’, ‘to seem’, or to ‘appear’. They function as complements that qualify the subject of a sentence. They are, as their name suggests, in the predicate of the sentence. Were I to say ‘the goblin seemed happy’ or ‘the teacher was part time’, ‘happy’ and ‘part time’ are predicative adjectives, preceded by the linking verbs ‘seemed’ and ‘was’. Adjectives exist to answer questions. If you are facing challenges, someone might ask you ‘which challenges?’ New challenges. ‘How many?’ Several. ‘What kind of challenges?’ Challenges of the insurmountable variety.

Further examples are words like ‘perfect’, ‘important’, ‘hot’, and ‘absent’ in these examples. Dates can function as adjectives too, such as in ‘the June 2014 financial statement’ and ‘the May 18, 2015, graduation ceremony’.

So do numbers: ‘Four times’, ‘the fifth column’, ‘all the students’. ‘Cardinal’ numbers are the written form of numbers, such as ‘four’, whereas ‘ordinal’ numbers put them in sequence, such as ‘fifth’.

Participles and infinitives sometimes function as adjectives. Consider the sentence ‘the delighted children and the smirking gruffalo could not decide which ice-cream flavours to choose’, where ‘delighted’, a past participle, ‘smirking’, a present participle, and ‘to choose’, an infinitive, are adjectives.

Adjectives can be ‘marked’ to indicate a degree. This means that they can take a positive, comparative, or superlative form.

Let’s look at the sentence ‘she is bright’, in which ‘bright’ is a positive form. ‘Bright’ is a quality, and, of course, an adjective, but one that can take on varying degrees. ‘She is brighter than he is’ employs the adjective ‘brighter’, allowing for a degree of comparison. In the sentence ‘she is the brightest student’ we use the word ‘brightest’ in the superlative degree. The comparative form is often made by adding ‘e-r’ to the root word, the superlative is often made by adding ‘e-s-t’. Here are some common examples of adjectives and their various degrees of comparison.

Some words take irregular forms in the comparative and superlative, such as ‘good’, ‘better’, and ‘best’. Here is a list of adjectives, marked to indicate degrees, which take an irregular form when doing so. As you can see, ‘more’ denotes a comparative degree and ‘most’ denotes a superlative. Some adjectives cannot be marked to indicate a degree, such as ‘eternal’, ‘fatal’, impossible, ‘maximum’, ‘minimum’, ‘perfect’, ‘unique’, ‘entire’, and ‘infinite’.

Something cannot be ‘more perfect’ or ‘more eternal’, so we refer to them as ‘absolute adjectives’.

While sometimes necessary, adjectives are often overused.

Isaac Asimov railed against what he termed ‘fatty adjectival froth’:

Adjectives which, while they may enrich the text, don’t contribute to the meaning of a sentence. Adjectives leave less to the imagination.

Take the sentence ‘the sun went down over the sea’. No adjectival description is necessary. While a writer could write half a page about the sun, the sea, their interpersonal relationship, the light blinking off the crests of waves, the gleaming aureole of the last light, and the aurous luminescence of the foam, their reader already knows about the sun and the sea. They can imagine the scene for themselves, and will only be tired by too much further description.

Mark Twain addressed adjectives as follows:

When using adjectives, avoid clichés. Snow-capped mountains, fathomless depths, crystal waters, deep, dark woods, and azure skies are all lazy, hackneyed expressions. It is best to let nouns and verbs speak for themselves, and to use adjectives actively—with serious consideration—rather than by default. Rather than ‘the old lady’, say ‘the crone’; instead of ‘the large, impressive building’ say ‘the edifice’. As useful as adjectives are, they should be used sparingly and with purpose.

Adjectival sequencing, punctuation and determiners.

Greetings. In this week’s second lecture, we’ll be covering adjectival sequencing, punctuation, and determiners. Sometimes, you may want to use several adjectives in a sequence to describe the one thing. However, multiple adjectives in a sequence conform to a specific order. While these rules come naturally to native English speakers, they are, nevertheless, important to know. Some grammarians refer to this as ‘The Royal Order of Adjectives’.

In accordance with The Royal Order of Adjectives, such words are arranged in sequence according to observation, size, shape, age, colour, origin, material, and any qualifier. For example: ‘An expensive old umbrella stand’, where ‘expensive’ is an observation, ‘old’ is, of course, the age, and ‘umbrella’ qualifies the noun ‘stand’. In the sentence ‘her long black silk gown’, ‘long’ defines the shape, ‘black’ the colour, and ‘silk’ the material, of the noun ‘gown’.

There are exceptions to this rule. Sometimes, a word might come first for emphasis, as in ‘I want the silver antique tea pot, not the pewter one’. Whereas, according to The Royal Order of Adjectives, the sentence would read ‘I want the antique silver tea pot’, ‘silver’, the material, precedes ‘antique’, its age, because it is being compared to ‘pewter’. When punctuating cumulative adjectives, put commas only between those of the same category. Also, never put a comma after a determiner, or before the noun being described. The phrase ‘six small apples’ requires no comma between ‘six’ and ‘small’. Similarly, there is no comma after the determiner or before the noun in ‘the great white whale’.

However, in the phrase ‘the long, rectangular wooden box’ there is a comma between ‘long’ and ‘rectangular’, because they are both of the same category: That of ‘shape’.

You should also use a comma if ‘and’ could be placed between the words, and if the words could be reversed and still retain your intended meaning. In ‘some sneaky and hungry goblins stole my food, ‘some sneaky, hungry goblins stole my food’, and ‘some hungry, sneaky goblins stole my food’, ‘and’ can be placed between ‘sneaky’ and ‘hungry’, and the sentence will mean the same thing in each case. Phrasal adjectives, also known as compound adjectives, modify nouns. They take a hyphen when coming before a noun, and not when coming after. They are not hyphenated in proper nouns. For example, you could write ‘the wine-dark sea’, and use a hyphen, but would describe the sea as ‘wine dark’. In the same way, a ‘30-cent cone’ is hyphenated, whereas ‘the cone is 30 cents’ is not. Note that numbers do not pluralise. Finally, ‘The Monty Python comedy school’, which would otherwise take a hyphen, does not because ‘Monty Python’ is a proper noun.

When two phrasal adjectives share an ending, it is correct to remove the ending of the first phrase, provided you keep the ending of the second. Consider the phrase ‘ the eight- or nine-year-old boy’, where ‘year-old’ is omitted in the first phrase. Some adjectives can morph into nouns, such as collectibles, when referring to collectible objects, or a post-mortem, when referring to a post-mortem examination. Some adjectives can also morph into verbs. In the sentence ‘the Fonz is a pretty cool guy’, ‘cool’ is an adjective. In ‘be sure to cool the drinks before the Fonz gets here’, the adjective ‘cool’ functions as a verb.

Our final point on adjectives is ‘determiners’. Determiners introduce nouns or noun phrases, and provide information regarding possession, definiteness, specificity, or quantity. While they function like adjectives, they are not adjectives, as they express relationships rather than attributes.

Determiners can be articles, possessive nouns, demonstrative, possessive, or indefinite pronouns, quantifiers, cardinal numbers, or ordinal numbers.

In the sentence ‘a large dog walked by’, ‘a’, an article, is the determiner. In ‘Kate’s car has broken down’, ‘Kate’s’ is a possessive noun. In the sentences ‘there’s only one turkey left’ and ‘Alice came second last’, ‘one’ and ‘second’ are determiners, and cardinal and ordinal numbers respectively. As you can see, some determiners are also pronouns. To distinguish between them, you must determine their function in the sentence. Consider the sentence ‘how many chocolates did you eat?’

If the response is ‘we ate several chocolates’, ‘several’, an indefinite pronoun, is a determiner. But, if the response is ‘we ate several’, then ‘several’ functions as a pronoun. That’s it for adjectives. Next week, we’ll move on to adverbs.