XII. Adjectives. Their grammatical categories.

The adjective expresses the meaning of property of a substance. It means that for every A used in a sentence some noun is used or implied, whose property it denotes, such as its material, colour, dimensions, position, state, and other characteristics, both permanent and temporary. So, unlike nouns, A’s do not have a full nominative(назывная) value. Words like “long” or “hospitable” cannot function in the sentence independently from a collocation showing what is long and who is hospitable. The semantically bound character of the adjective is emphasized in English by the use of the substitute “one” in the absence of the notional head-noun in the phrase: I could see big figures, but I couldn’t see the little ones on the chart.

Form the syntactical point of view, A’s can combine with nouns, usually in pre-position, and occasionally in post-position: “times immemorial” (usually these are borrowings from Romanic languages), with link-verbs, both functional and notional: He was guilty, He was found guilty; with modifying adverbs. I can be combined with nouns with a preposition (fond of, jealous of, curious of, angry with etc) Many of such adjectival collocations have essentially a verbal meaning: to be fond of – love, to be jealous of – envy, etc.

In the sentence the A’s perform the function of an attribute and a predicative. Of the two, the more specific function of the A is that of an attribute, since the function of a predicative can be performed by a noun as well.

To the derivational features of A’s belong a number of suffixes and prefixes, of which the most important are: -ful (hopeful), - less (jobless), ish (bluish), ous (famous), ive (decorative), ic (basic), -ly (friendly), -un, im.

As far as word-changing features, A, having lost in the course of history all its forms of grammatical agreement with the noun, has only the category of comparison.

Subclasses of adjectives:

1. relative (related to nouns – historical, wooden, mediaeval); among them there are:

- property that can be graded quantitatively, together with the noun it describes (a military design, a grammatical topic);

- -relative adjectives receive qualitative features, when used idiomatically (wooden =awkward)

2.qualitative, which denote various qualities of substances;

- some of them have absolute qualitative meaning (extinct, deaf, dead, but “Take dead, mort, muerto, and todt. Todt was the deadest of them all”)

- adjectives of moderated quality (whitish, semi-detached, half-open)

- adjectives of extreme quality (ultimate, final, crucial)

Categories of adjectives:

The category of comparison gives a relative evaluation of the quantity of a quality. It is constituted by the opposition of the three forms of degrees of comparison: the basic form (positive degree), the form of restricted superiority (the comparative degree, limits the comparison to two elements only); the form of unrestricted superiority (the superlative degree). This form has lexical restrictions (the strongest of the group, the biggest in the world).

We have the right to consider this a gradual opposition, as the basic form is used in comparative syntactic constructions of equality and negated equality: “The day is as long as the night on the 22^nd of March”, “Moscow is not so old as London” and is the unmarked member of the opposition. Together with marked, strong members of opposition “Venus is closer to the Sun than the Earth”, “Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun in the solar system”.

The synthetical form has affixes –er/-est and forms degrees of one-syllable words, and two syllable words ending in grapho-phonemic complexes –y (busier), -er (cleverer), -ow (narrower), -ble (nobler).

More than two-syllable adjectives and other two-syllable ones form analytical degrees of comparison, using auxiliary words – more/the most. The fact that this form doesn’t have the feature of “semantic idiomatism”, like analytical forms of the verb, let some grammarians consider that multi-syllable adjectives don’t have forms of comparison at all. Two other arguments in favour of free syntactic construction: the analogous construction to more/the most – less/the least; and second, the –most-combination, unlike the synthetic superlative, can take the indefinite article, expressing not the superlative, but the elative meaning: “I found myself in a most awkward situation.”(элятив, возвышенный – добрейший человек, глупейшее положение). However, the elative just gives the idea of very high degree of property, like “very awkward”, in oral speech it is always unstressed, while “It was the most awkward situation in my life” expresses exactly the superlative degree of quality. The most-combination can also be used as eleative: “We’ll welcome you with the greatest pleasure”. The expressive nature of the elative is in the combination of two features that contradict each other: the categorial form of the superlative on the one hand, and the absence of a comparison on the other. The two forms of the superlative of different functional purposes receive the two different marks by the article determination, and the functions of the two combinations are different.

The meaning of the analytical forms more/the most and less/the least is directly opposite, which means that they belong to units of the same general order. Thus, the less/least combinations, similar to the more/most, constitute specific forms of comparison, which may be called forms of ‘reverse comparison’.The whole category includes not three, but 5 different forms, making up the two series – direct and reverse, the inferiority degrees of comparison.

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