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Adjectives.
Summary. Adjectives tell you more about nouns. In English adjectives don't change are always singular (even if the noun is plural). You can use several adjectives before a noun, or you can use the adjective on its own in a phrase. There are different kinds of adjectives, and they come in a certain order. Here we are going to look at: 1. Kinds of adjective. 2. The Grammar of adjectives. 3. Other things that describe nouns
Kinds of adjective.
It is important to know what kinds of adjectives there are. When we do the grammar of adjectives, you will see that some sorts of adjectives are written in front of other ones.
Adjectives of type
These are the most common kind of adjective. They tell you most of the information you would like to know about a noun. They describe things like shape, size, colour and age. For example: Imagine you want to buy some apples. There are some things you would like to know about the apples. Colour - are they red or green? Size - are they big or small? Taste - are they sweet or bitter? Cost - are they cheap or expensive? Age - are the apples fresh or old? The answers to these questions are given by adjectives of type - thay are tasty, big, green, expensive fresh apples.
Derived Adjectives
Sometimes adjectives are made from nouns: For example: friendly from friend / smelly from smell Or from verbs For example: Sticky from to stick / Shiny from to shine. (You can see that these adjectives often are made by putting -y and -ly on the end.) But nouns can also be made into adjectives without any change For example: Cat food / Air travel / football boots.
Compound Adjectives
Some adjectives are small sentences by themselves. These "compound adjectives" are often joined by hyphens ( - ). They are groups of words that are not all adjectoves, but they make a meaning that is just one adjective. For example: an upside-down car. / a potato-and-onion soup These "compound adjectives" do not always have hyphens : For example: A New Year's Day party.
Numbers
Numbers are usually adjectives, because the information they give is how many of the noun. They can be cardinal (like one, two, three), or ordinal (like first, second, third). For example: A thousand pounds. The second example. Sometimes numbers can look like nouns because of ellipsis (ellipsis is when you do not say all of the words in a sentence because the other person knows what the words will be). For example: Jane has one boyfriend, but Mary has two (boyfriends) one and two are both adjectives. Sometimes adjectives of number are not precise. For example: A few days. Many kinds of adjective. In grammar, adjectives of number come before most other kinds of adjective.
Demonstrative Adjectives
These are called demonstrative because they show something. The demonstrative adjectives are: this and that (singular), and these and those (plural). This and these mean "the one(s) here"; and that and those mean "the one(s) over there". For example: This apple here is green, that apple there is red. These examples are useful, and those given above are useful too. Demonstrative adjectives come even before adjectives of number.
If we use more than one adjective after a noun, we can put and between the adjectives: For example: The house was old and dark and empty. If you put lots of adjectives, you must put and before the last one. For example: The house was old, dark and empty.