ADJECTIVES

Welcome to this lecture headed “ADJECTIVES”. We will be discussing all about adjectives. Enjoy your lecture.

Adjectives are explanatory words. Adjectives are used to explain or provide information about things, ideas and people that is : nouns or pronouns. In other words an adjective modifies a noun or a pronoun.

For instance:-

The black cat barked. (The adjective black describes the noun “cat”.)

The most general question an adjective may answer is “What kind of …?”

The great thing is that in English language an adjective form does not change, as soon as you learn it that’s it whether the noun being described is male or female, singular or plural, subject or object.

A few adjectives provide us with factual information about the noun – age, size colour etc (fact adjectives – can’t be disputed with).

A few adjectives illustrate what somebody thinks about something or somebody – nice, horrid, beautiful and so on (opinion adjectives – not everyone may accept).

If you are asked questions with which, whose, what kind, or how many, you would require an adjective to be able to provide the answer.

There are various forms of adjectives in English language:

Numeric adjective: For example six, one hundred and one etc.

Quantitative adjective: like more, all, some, half, more than enough and so on.

Qualitative adjective: such as colour, size, smell etc.

Possessive adjective such as: my, his, their, your and so on.

Interrogative adjective like: which, whose, what etc.

Demonstrative adjective like: this, that, those, these etc.

The articles a, an, and the are a specific form of adjective known as articles, and the possessives my, our, your, and their are frequently referred to as possessive adjectives.

Colour

Adjectives can be used to explain colour.

Examples:

blue, red, green, brown, yellow, black, white, grey etc.

For instance:

“The white bus.” or “The white bags”.

Opinion

Adjectives can be used to give opinion about something.

For instance:

good, pretty, right, wrong, funny, light, happy, sad, full, soft, hard etc.

For instance:

He is a pretty boy. / She is a silly girl.

Size

Adjectives can be used to talk about size.

Examples:

big, small, little, long, tall, short, same as, etc.

For instance:

“The big goat.” or “The big cow”.

Age

Adjectives can be used to describe age.

For instance:

“He was an old man.” or “She was an old woman.”

Shape

Adjectives can be used to talk about shape.

For instance:

round, circular, triangular, rectangular, square, oval, etc.

For Example:

“It was a round box.” or “They were round boxes.”

Origin

Adjectives can be utilized to describe origin.

For instance:-

“It was a British flag.” or “They were British flags.”

Material

Adjectives can be used to talk about the material something is made of.

“A wooden spoon.” or “Wooden spoons.”

In English we frequently alter nouns into adjectives.

For instance: glass – a glass vase / metal – a metal tray etc.

Distance

Adjectives can be used to describe distance.

long  / short

long, short, far, around, start, high, low, etc.

For instance:

“He went for a long walk.” or “He loves going for lots of long walks.”

Temperature

Adjectives can be used to describe temperature.

e.g cold, warm, hot, cool, etc.

For instance:

“It was a cold day” or “We eat ice cream on hot days.”

Time

Adjectives can be used to describe time. For example: late, early, bed, nap, dinner, lunch, day, morning, night, etc.

For instance:

“We had an early start.”

Purpose

Adjectives can be used to describe purpose. (These adjectives frequently end with “-ing”.)

For instance:

“He gave me a sleeping bag.” or “He gave us sleeping bags.”

You would have observed from the ongoing that- Have you noticed how the adjectives stay unaltered, whether they are describing a masculine, feminine, singular or plural noun!

When making use of more than one adjective to modify a noun, the adjectives may be alienated by a conjunction (and) or by commas (,).

For instance:

“Her hair was long and blonde.” or “She had long, blonde hair.”

More instances:

Adjective	Pretty	Serious	Fast	Quiet
For Example:	Daisy is a pretty girl	Ugo was a serious boy	It could be a fast train.	They were quiet children

Adjectives that come immediately before the noun are referred to as attributive adjectives.

Adjectives can as well be used after a few verbs. They do not describe the verb, adverbs do that.

Adjectives after a verb explain the subject of the verb (typically a noun or pronoun).

For instance:

“Leo looks tired.”

The subject (in this instance Leo) is described as being tired and  not the verb to look.

There is as well the adjective used to, which is such a beast that it gets its own section

Adjective Order

Adjectives can be used to describe many things, from physical size, age, shape, colour, material, to more conceptual things like opinion, origin and purpose.

We can make use of adjectives together to provide a detailed description of something.

Adjectives that express opinions normally come before all others, but it can from time to time depend on what precisely you want to emphasize.

For instance: 

“That’s a nice, big, pink bag.” (It shows that you like the bag.)

“That’s a nice blue.” (It shows that you like the colour.)

When we group adjectives together there is a general (occasionally flexible) rule for the position of each form of adjective, these are:-

Position	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th
	Opinion	Size	Age	Shape	Colour	Material	Origin	Purpose
	Nice	Small	Old	Square	Black	Plastic	British	Racing
	Ugly	Big	New	Circular	Blue	Cotton	American	Running

You might exchange adjectives that express an opinion and an adjective based on fact depending on what you wish to emphasize:-

For instance:

“She had a long, ugly nose.” emphasizing the length of her nose.

“He was a silly, little boy.” emphasizing that the boy was silly.

This is just for fun as you wouldn’t normally see so many adjectives in one description.

For instance:

“She had a big, ugly, old, baggy, blue, stripy, leather, British, knitting bag.”

Comparative form of Adjectives

When we compare things, people or even ideas we consider what makes them appear different from each other.

Comparative adjectives are used to show what quality one thing has more or less than the other. They normally come before any other adjectives. It’s a good idea to learn opposites (antonyms) when learning adjectives.

For example:

The man on the left is taller than the man on the right. 

The man on the right is shorter than the man on the left.

Have you observed that when we are comparing two things like the one shown above we put than between the adjective and the thing being compared.

Fast / Slow

A car is faster than a bicycle. 

A bicycle is slower than a car.

For instance:

Big / Small

The red bag is bigger than the blue bag. 

The blue bag is smaller than the red bag.

Creating the comparative

How you create the comparative from an adjective depends – on the number of syllables and the spelling of the adjective.

Form	Rule	For example
Words of one syllable ending in ‘e’.	Add -r to the end of the word	wide – wider

Possessive Adjectives

Possessive adjectives are used to illustrate ownership or possession.

Subject pronoun	Possessive adjective
I	My
You	Your
He	His
She	Her
It	Its
We	Our
They	Their

For instance:

I own a phone. = It is my laptop.

You own this tablet (I presume). = It is your tablet.

My husband owns a jet. = It is his jet.

My brother owns a house. = It is his house.

My dog has a food bowl. = It is its food bowl

Nigeria Eagle own a football ground. = It is their football ground.

Superlative Adjectives

The superlative is used to say a thing, person, or idea has the most specific quality within a group or of its kind.

Superlative adjectives normally come before any other adjectives.

Some adjectives are however irregular:-

‘good’ becomes ‘the best’

‘bad’ becomes ‘the worst’

‘far’ becomes ‘the furthest’

For instance

“Justin is the best student in the class “

“Ijeoma is the worst student in the class.”

“In the country, the Hausas are the furthest in the far north.

The superlative must constantly be preceded by ‘the’.

For instance:

“The Niger and Benue rivers are the broadest rivers in the country.

He is the fattest boy in the class.

“Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world.”

“She is is the prettiest woman I have ever seen.”

Table showing a list of common irregular adjectives

Shape	Size
broad	average
crooked	big
curved	fat
deep	gigantic
jagged	long

Thanks for reaching to this point marking the end of this lecture.

Your Lecture Master:

Mst. Ugonwanne Joshua