Let's talk about adjectives, and
adjectives are a kind of modifier. So a
modifier is a word that changes the
meaning of other words around it. And
adjectives tend to modify two things in
particular: they modify (oh that's a
really ugly arrow there) they
modify nouns and they modify
pronouns. Now
adjectives also answer a number of
questions, and these questions are "which?"
and "what kind of?" and "how much?" and "how
many?" ... so a whole bunch of
questions here: "which?" "what kind of?" "how
much?" "how many?" But, in some ways, it's best
not just to ask the questions and hope that
we can find the adjectives in the
sentence.
Sometimes it's better to actually look
at the noun or the pronoun, find those
first, and then try to figure out how
these adjectives are modifying those
particular words. So instead of just
asking questions, we want to look at
function and see what word in the
sentence goes with which. Now I've used
this picture here to illustrate how
adjectives work. So we have a number of
nouns, most of them are just "car" or "cars,"
and in each case we've tried to find an
adjective that can modify or change the
meaning of that noun. The first couple
are fairly straightforward. So if we want
to say, "well, how many cars are there?"
that's one of our questions, then we can
say "three." And if we want to say, "what
kind of car?" we could say, "well, the red
car."
So both of these first examples are
simply answering some of our questions,
and they're pretty straightforward kinds of
adjectives. But things can get trickier
as well. And so most of our attention,
then, is going to be spent on these
unusual cases where other parts of
speech or larger phrases and clauses can
function
like adjectives. And that's really where
some of the difficulty comes in
with adjectives. So in our third example,
then, we have "car show." And you can see
that "show" is the noun, so that part is
the noun, and "car" -- so far we've seen car
is a noun. In fact usually it is. But
nouns can sometimes function as
adjectives.
So if you were to say, "what kind of show?"
so that's our question, "what kind of show?"
then you could say, "well, it's a car show."
And so the word "car," even though it's a
noun, can function like an adjective. In
fact, if I were giving a test to somebody,
trying to figure out if they knew their
parts of speech, and they answered that "car"
was an adjective or a noun, either one, I would
give them full marks. So it doesn't
really matter to me which one you say
it is as long as you understand the
function in the sentence.
In the fourth place here we have
the word "the" [which] is used as an adjective, and
the word "the" is also referred to as an
article. So in English we have just a few
articles. We have "the," "a," and "an," and "an"
it's just a version of "a," but this time
before a vowel. So the articles are not a
separate part of speech, but they are
classified as adjectives, so watch out
for those. We're going to jump to the
top of the second column; we'll come back
to the last example in a moment. And in
this case what we have is a pronoun
being used as an adjective.
So pronouns also can function
like adjectives. And we could pick a
number of different ones as well. So we
could say "any car" or "that
car."
Each one changes the meaning of "car" ever
so slightly.
We can also use participles as
adjectives. So in this case we have "used,"
which is a past participle, and "traveling,"
which is a present participle. So
both of these, they're both considered
verbals. And verbals can sometimes act
like adjectives.
It seems kind of weird because they used to
be verbs, but they have sort of transformed
themselves into adjectives in this case.
And that really shows how flexible the
English language is. And I really
encourage you to think of words as
not just being one part of speech all
the time
(many of them of course are), but parts of
speech can often change what they're
doing. So a noun can become an adjective,
or pronoun can become an adjective.
We also have some larger units that can
function like adjectives. So in this case
here we have "in the middle," which is a
prepositional phrase, starts with a
preposition, and then this whole thing is
describing the car. So which car? The car
in the middle. And our last example here:
"the car that is painted green" ...
this is an entire clause. So "that is
painted green" --
that's a dependent clause, cannot stand
by itself as a complete unit.
And it's modifying, again, "car."
Which car? The car that is painted green.
Now there's just a couple of things
that we want to finish up with here. And
the first is that the adjective doesn't
always have to be right next to the noun.
So if you were to say, "the car is red," so
"red" is our adjective, then you can see
that "red" is a little bit removed from
"car"; it's not right in front of it. So
that's one thing to notice. And then the
last thing that will notice here, as we
try to squeeze in as much information as
we can,
is that sometimes adjectives can
function as other parts of speech as
well. This is fairly rare, but you might,
for instance, talk about "the good, the bad,
and the ugly." And these are adjectives,
but you can use them as nouns.
So if you say, "the good the bad and the
ugly," that's a case of adjectives being
used as nouns, which is kind of fitting
since so many other parts of speech try
to be adjectives. We should should at
least let the adjectives get to be
something else as well.
Thats it for adjectives. Try the exercises
on the website, and, before you know it,
you'll be able to spot them
no problem.