A Red Balloon a Tall Woman a Loving Dog a Heavy Weight

Adjectives (Guided notes) Nouns and verbs are the basic building blocks of language; all other words are dependent on them in some way and act as either relational links or modifiers. You have probably learned that adjectives modify or describe nouns. Usually, this is true.

A red balloon a tall woman a loving dog a heavy weight

But not all words that modify nouns are adjectives, and not all adjectives modify nouns. But what does modification mean? Look at the series of boxes below. They are all the same.

So, we modify one so that it stands out from the rest.

This is the purpose of modification: the modifier differentiates one member from all the other members of the same class. In English, however, we don’t always use adjectives to modify nouns. We can modify nouns with…

Adjectives: The tall man differentiates one man from others who are not as tall as he is.

Nouns: The kitchen sink differentiates one kind of sink from others in a house.

Verbs/verb phrases: The cat sleeping in the sun identifies a specific cat.

Prepositions/ propositional phrases: A bottle of milk names a bottle that differs from a bottle of wine or a bottle of pop.

So, with so many kinds of grammatical structures that can modify a noun, how can we identify adjectives? Adjectives have several characteristics not shared by the other kinds of noun modifiers and that’s what we’ll be looking at here.

Many adjectives have common ______.

…like - Barnlike, swanlike, childlike, crablike, catlike, etc.

…ous - Porous, copious, strenuous, vacuous, etc.

…able - Livable, drivable, doable, likeable, tolerable, etc. Adjectives (Guided notes)

Adjectives can be made ______or ______.

a. Through inflection (the sad puppy, the sadder puppy, the saddest puppy) (a good shoe, a better shoe, the best shoe)

b. Through using ______and ______. (The beautiful car, the more beautiful car, the most beautiful car) (A cunning fox, a more cunning fox, the most cunning fox)

Adjectives can be modified with ______or ______which specify the degree or quantity of the quantity for which the adjective stands.

Ex. The very sad man The rather hungry dog The somewhat thirsty cat The quite lovable pillow A really hot day A fairly cold morning The too friendly man The awfully tired girl A pretty ugly sweater

______.

The Test frame sentence. A test frame sentence is a sentence in which you should be able to plug in any adjective and have the sentence still make sense. If you plug in the supposed adjective and the sentence does not make sense, then it is not an adjective.

The ______man is very ______.

To use the frame as a test you’ll need to place the base form of the same adjective in both slots: Ex. The sad man is very sad.

Note: In using the frame sentence, remember that not all adjectives can modify all nouns, so it may be necessary to change the noun in the frame.

For example, The grapey man is very grapey sounds a bit strange, but the grapey wine is very grapey works perfect.