Profile
Settings
Refer your friends
Sign out
As stated above, the basic subject-verb-object, although is the very necessity of sentence formation, encountering these basic sentences may not always be the case. Often, additions are made with these basic forms to convey the meaning of the sentence in a better and glorified way for the listener/reader to form a context with the sentence. One such modification that can be done is modifying the nouns/pronouns in the sentence, which takes the positions of subject and object. Adjectives do just the job. Adjectives provide additional information about a noun in a sentence. While adding an adjective is not compulsory for sentence formation, having an adjective does enhance the quality and meaning of the sentence.
Adjectives are words used with nouns or pronouns to describe the quantity or some quality of the thing stated. They essentially have the job of modifying the noun or the pronoun. They give the quality which makes the noun distinct and specific.
For example,
A black dog was standing right behind me. Here, the noun is the dog and a word modifying or giving a specificity about the dog/the noun is the word black. Therefore, the word black is the adjective for the noun dog in this sentence.
Degrees Of Comparison
For every adjective, if a comparison is being made between two or more nouns, a degree of comparison is necessary. The use of adjectives in a sentence can be of one of three types, namely: absolute, comparative and superlative. The absolute form uses the adjective in its simplest form to describe the noun. The comparative form is used to compare for the quality described by the adjective between two such nouns and describes one of the nouns to be better than the other. The superlative form makes the same comparison, but instead of two competitors, now the competitors are more than two. Most of the time, the article ‘the’ is used before the superlative degree.
Some adjectives have been listed below, in all three degrees of comparison:
They can be used in sentences such as:
- I have got the best cupcakes in the world.
- You are more beautiful than your sister.
- Meesha runs fast.
Types Of Adjectives
Off late, there are 12 types of adjectives that have been classified so far. They are listed below with an example of each:
- Descriptive
E.g. He unintentionally hurt her when he labelled her as an annoying lady.
- Interrogative
E.g. What colour shoes do you want to have as a gift?
- Proper
E.g. I love Italian food.
- Quantitative
E.g. I have two brothers and one sister.
- Indefinite
E.g. Few people get this opportunity that you are getting.
- Compound
E.g. Every day we have to write a 1000-word article.
- Predicate
E.g. She is smart enough to handle them.
- Distributive
E.g. Each participant has to speak for 2 minutes, followed by a question and answer round.
- Coordinate
E.g. She wore a red and black dress at the party.
- Possessive
E.g. Is it their bag?
- Demonstrative
E.g. That lady had scolded me yesterday.
- Articles
E.g. This is the university.
Conclusion
Adjectives, as you have learnt above, are words used to provide additional information in the sentence about a noun or a pronoun. So the adjectives are usually followed by the noun they describe the properties of. Adjectives can be of many types, based on how they are used in a sentence and what kind of modification they do. Also, last but a very important point to remember is that adjectives can have 3 degrees of comparison if they are being used to compare between two or more things. The basic form is an absolute degree, the form used for comparison between two things is the comparative degree and the form used for comparison between more than two things is the superlative degree.
