Definition
Adjectives
are words that describe or modify another person or thing in the sentence. The Articles — a,
an, and the — are adjectives.
·
the
tall professor
·
the
lugubrious lieutenant
·
a
solid commitment
·
a
month's pay
·
a
six-year-old child
·
the
unhappiest, richest man
If
a group of words containing a subject and verb acts as an adjective, it is
called an Adjective Clause. My sister, who is much older than I am, is
an engineer. If an adjective clause is stripped of its subject and verb, the
resulting modifier becomes an Adjective
Phrase: He is the man who
iskeeping my family in the poorhouse.
Before
getting into other usage considerations, one general note about the use — or
over-use — of adjectives: Adjectives
are frail; don't ask them to do more work than they should. Let your broad-shouldered verbs and
nouns do the hard work of description. Be particularly cautious in your use of
adjectives that don't have much to say in the first place: interesting, beautiful, lovely,
exciting. It is your job as a writer to create beauty and excitement and
interest, and when you simply insist on its presence without showing it to your reader — well, you're
convincing no one.
Consider
the uses of modifiers in this adjectivally rich paragraph from Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel. (Charles
Scribner's, 1929, p. 69.) Adjectives are highlighted in this color; participles, verb
forms acting as adjectives, are highlighted in this blue. Some people would argue that
words that are part of a name — like "East India Tea House — are not really adjectival and
that possessive nouns — father's, farmer's — are not technically adjectives, but
we've included them in our analysis of Wolfe's text.
He remembered yet the East India Tea House
at the Fair, the sandalwood, the turbans, and the robes, the cool interior
and the smell of India tea; and he had felt now the nostalgic thrill of dew-wet mornings in Spring, the cherry scent, the cool clarion earth, the wet loaminess
of the garden, thepungent breakfast smells and the floating snow of blossoms. He knew the inchoate sharp excitement of hot dandelions
in young earth; in July, of watermelons bedded in sweet hay, inside a farmer's covered wagon; of
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SAIFUL’S GRAMMAR
cantaloupe and crated peaches; and the scent of orange rind, bitter-sweet, before a fire of coals.
He knew the good male smell
of his father's sitting-room; of the smooth worn leather sofa, with the gaping horse-hair rent; of the blistered varnished wood upon the hearth; of the heated calf-skin bindings; of the flat moist plug of apple tobacco, stuck with a red flag;
of wood-smoke and burnt leaves in October; of the brown tired autumn earth; of honey-suckle at night; of warm nasturtiums,
of a clean ruddy farmer who comes weekly with printed butter, eggs, and milk; of fat limp underdone bacon and of coffee; of a bakery-oven
in the wind; of large deep-huedstringbeans smoking-hot and seasoned well with salt and butter; of a room
of old pine boards
in which books and carpets have been stored, longclosed; of Concord grapes in their long white baskets.
An
abundance of adjectives like this would be uncommon in contemporary prose.
Whether we have lost something or not is left up to you.
Position
of Adjectives
Unlike Adverbs, which often
seem capable of popping up almost anywhere in a sentence, adjectives nearly
always appear immediately before the noun or noun phrase that they modify.
Sometimes they appear in a string of adjectives, and when they do, they appear
in a set order according to category. (See Below.) When
indefinite pronouns — such as something, someone, anybody — are modified by an
adjective, the adjective comes after the pronoun:
Anyone capable of doing something horrible to someone
nice should be punished.
Something wicked this way comes.
Something wicked this way comes.
And
there are certain adjectives that, in combination with certain words, are
always "postpositive" (coming after the thing they modify):
The president elect, heir apparent to the Glitzy fortune, lives in New York
See,
also, the note on a- adjectives,
below, for the position of such words as "ablaze, aloof, aghast."
