Adjectives and Adverbs

ADJECTIVES

Adjectives are one of the four major word classes, along with nouns, verbs and adverbs. Examples of adjectives are: big, small, blue, old, rich and nice. They give us more information about people, animals or things represented by nouns and pronouns. Adjectives fall into two categories: descriptive and limiting.

Descriptive adjectives are those which describe the colour, size, or quality of a person or a thing while limiting adjectives place restrictions on the words they modify (quantity, distance, possession, etc.)

Descriptive	Limiting
Beautiful	Cardinal numbers (one, two)
Expensive	Ordinal numbers (first, second)
Interesting	Possesives (my, your, his, her, its)
Big	Demonstratives (this, that, these, those)
Delicious	Quantity (few, many, much)
Important	Articles (a, an, the)

Examples of adjectives:

·         The dress is expensive

·         That bag is different from the rest of the bags

·         His phone is similar to mine

·         I am disappointed of you

·         That man is very cruel

·         I am hungry

ADVERBS

Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. Many descriptive adjectives can be changed to adverbs by adding –ly to the adjective base.

Adjectives	Adverbs
Loud	Loudly
Elegant	Elegantly
Slow	Slowly
Terrible	Terribly

Adjectives With Linking Verbs

A special category of verbs connects or links the subject with the subject complement. Unlike most verbs, these do not show action. They must be modified by adjectives, not adverbs.

Verbs that can be linked to adjectives are:

·         Be

·         Become

·         Remain

·         Stay

·         Appear

·         Seem

·         Sound

·         Feel

·         Look

·         Smell

·         Taste

EXAMPLE:

·         Utie feels bad for mocking Iyan

·         Louis becomes tired after running for 1 hour

·         Julia looks beautiful in that dress

·         They were sorry for cancelling the concert

·         The pizza tastes good

·         Jimmy looks at his dog happily