Adjective
An adjective is a part of speech that typically modifies a noun or pronoun by expressing a quality, quantity, or other attribute.
Attributive adjective: An adjective placed within a noun phrase to modify its noun directly. In “a red bicycle,” the adjective appears before and modifies the noun.
Part of speech: A grammatical category grouping words by their forms, functions, or distribution. Adjective is one word class in systems that classify words by grammatical behavior.
Participial adjective: An adjective formed from a verb’s participle, such as “broken” or “interesting.” Participial forms show how adjective use can overlap with verb morphology.
Intersective adjective: An adjective whose combination with a noun denotes entities belonging to both categories, as “red car” denotes red cars. Intersective meaning lets an adjective independently restrict which objects a noun phrase can denote.
Predicative adjective: An adjective used as a complement after a linking verb or noun. In “the bicycle is red,” the adjective describes the subject through a linking verb.
Noun: A word class commonly used to name people, places, things, and abstract entities. Nouns are the typical words adjectives modify.
Relational adjective: An adjective that classifies a noun by its relation to a domain, material, or institution. Relational adjectives such as “medical” classify rather than describe a gradable quality.
Subsective adjective: An adjective whose denotation depends on its noun, as “skillful” does in “skillful surgeon.” The adjective narrows the noun’s extension without describing a fixed, noun-independent class.
Adjective phrase: A phrase whose head is an adjective, often accompanied by modifiers or complements. An adjective can head a phrase, as in “very proud of her work.”
Pronoun: A word that can stand in for a noun phrase or participate in reference in other ways. Some adjectives can describe pronouns, as in “something unusual.”