An adjective phrase is a phrase whose head word is an adjective, e.g. fond of
steak, very happy, quite upset about it, etc. The adjective in an adjective
phrase can initiate the phrase, conclude the phrase, or appear in a medial
position. The dependents of the head adjective - i.e. the other words and
phrases inside the adjective phrase - are typically adverbs or prepositional
phrases, but they can also be clauses. Adjectives and adjective phrases
function in two basic ways in clauses, either attributively or predicatively.
When they are attributive, they appear inside a noun phrase and modify that
noun phrase, and when they are predicative, they appear outside the
noun phrase that they modify and typically follow a linking verb.
Examples The adjective phrases are underlined in
the following example sentences, the head adjective in each of these phrases
is in bold, and how the adjective phrase is functioning—attributively or
predicatively—is stated to the right of each example:
a. Sentences can contain tremendously long phrases. - Attributive adjective
phrase b. This sentence is not tremendously
long. - Predicative adjective phrase a. A player faster than you was on their
team. - Attributive adjective phrase b. He is faster than you. - Predicative
adjective phrase a. Sam ordered a very spicy but quite
small pizza. - Attributive adjective phrases
b. The pizza is very spicy but quite small. - Predicative adjective phrases
a. People angry with the high prices were protesting. - Attributive adjective
phrase b. The people are angry with the high
prices. - Predicative adjective phrase The distinguishing characteristic of an
attributive adjective phrase is that it appears inside the noun phrase that it
modifies. An interesting trait of these phrases in English is that an
attributive adjective alone generally precedes the noun, e.g. a proud man,
whereas a head-initial or head-medial adjective phrase follows its noun, e.g.
a man proud of his children. A predicative adjective, in contrast,
appears outside of the noun phrase that it modifies, usually after a linking
verb, e.g. The man is proud. Adjective phrase vs. adjectival phrase
The term adjectival phrase is sometimes used instead of adjective phrase.
However, there is tendency to call a phrase an adjectival phrase in such a
case where that phrase is functioning like an adjective phrase would, but does
not contain an actual adjective. For example, in Mr Clinton is a man of
wealth, the prepositional phrase of wealth modifies a man the way an
adjective would, and it could be reworded with an adjective, e.g. Mr
Clinton is a wealthy man. Similarly, that boy is friendless and That boy is
without a friend. Similarly, the term adjectival phrase is
commonly used for any phrase in attributive position, whether it is
technically an adjective phrase, noun phrase, or prepositional phrase. These
may be more precisely distinguished as phrasal attributives or attributive
phrases. This definition is commonly used in English style guides for
writing, where the terms attributive and adjective are frequently treated as
synonyms, because attributive phrases are typically hyphenated, whereas
predicative phrases generally are not, despite both modifying a noun.
Tree diagrams The structure of adjective phrases is
often represented using tree structures. There are two modern conventions for
doing this, constituency-based trees of phrase structure grammars and
dependency-based trees of dependency grammars. Both types of trees are
produced here. The following trees illustrate head-final adjective phrases,
i.e. adjective phrases that have their head adjective on the right side of the
phrase: The labels on the nodes in the trees are
acronyms: A = adjective, Adv = adverb, AP = adjective phrase, N = noun/pronoun,
P = preposition, PP = prepositional phrase. The constituency trees identify
these phrases as adjective phrases by labeling the top node with AP, and the
dependency trees accomplish the same thing by positioning the A node at the
top of the tree. The following trees illustrate the structure of head-initial
adjective phrases, i.e. adjective phrases that have their head on the left
side of the phrase: And the following trees illustrate the
structure of head-medial adjective phrases:
The important aspect of these tree structures - regardless of whether one
uses constituency or dependency to show the structure of phrases - is that they
are identified as adjective phrases by the label on the top node of each tree.
See also Notes
References