Adjectives are content words that describe nouns – this much is fairly straightforward. They can describe color, size, age, or other qualities (beautiful, honest, expensive), and can also serve, by describing, to identify or define a noun – for example, geothermal heating uses the adjective geothermal to identify or define a type of heat source. This second, defining way of using adjectives is particularly important in school based writing – for example, igneous rock, equilateral triangle, and constitutional convention, where low-frequency adjectives combine with often high frequency nouns to describe particular objects, events, or processes. When adjectives appear before the nouns they modify, they are called “predicative adjectives.”

In English, adjectives typically come directly before the nouns they “modify” – but not always. Adjectives also commonly appear as complements to stative verbs and the “be” verb, as follows:

Your dog is so cute!

This pasta smells delicious!

When adjectives appear following a verb like the examples above, they are called “attributive adjectives.”

(More to come!)