Adjective

An adjective is a part of speech which modifies a noun, usually making its meaning more specific. Adjectives are used in a predicative or attributive manner. In some languages, attributive adjectives precede the noun. This is the case in the Germanic languages, to which the English language belongs. In other languages, e.g. the Romance languages, the adjective follows the noun. However, adjective is not a universal word class; in other words, some languages do not have any adjectives. The Chinese languages, for example, have no adjectives; all the words that are translated into English as adjectives are, in fact, stative verbs.

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Some linguists also classify possessive pronouns, such as his or her, and demonstratives, such as this or that as adjectives. However, they can only be used in an attributive manner.

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An adjectival phrase is a phrase with an adjective as its head (e.g. full of toys). Adjectival phrases may occur as postmodifiers to a noun (a bin full of toys), or as predicatives to a verb (the bin is full of toys).

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Adjectives are sometimes used in place of nouns, as in many of the Beatitudes (e.g. "Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy"); these are called substantive adjectives. Such usage is very common in the Romance languages. In languages with grammatical genders, such as Latin, the gender of the adjective may indicate the gender of the implied noun; thus malus means the bad man; mala, the bad woman; malum, the bad thing. In some languages, participles are used as adjectives.

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English is rather unusual in that it allows nouns to be used attributively, as in a Georgia peach. These are not adjectives, as they cannot be used predicatively. While ripe has both roles (a ripe peach is similar in meaning to the peach is ripe), a Georgia peach cannot be rephrased as *the peach is Georgia.

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Part of speech: In grammar, a part of speech or word class is defined as the role that a word (or sometimes a phrase) plays in a sentence. In transformational-generative grammar, parts of speech are known as lexical categories. There are open word classes, which constantly acquire new members, and closed word clas...

Noun: A noun, or noun substantive, is a word or phrase that refers to a person, place, thing, event, substance or quality. Nouns are parts of speech and can be classified in different ways such as proper nouns (e.g. "Janet") versus common nouns (e.g. "girl"), or collective nouns (e.g. "bunch", "herd"). N...

Germanic languages: The Germanic languages form one of the branches of the Indo-European (IE) language family. The largest Germanic languages are English and German, with ca. 340 and 120 million native speakers, respectively. Other significant languages includes a number of Low German languages including Dutch, and the...