Adjectives

Adjectives deal with the section of Grammar that helps in identifying, quantifying or describing the kind of noun or pronoun.

For example: She was wearing a red skirt.

In the sentence above, red describes the type of skirt (noun) worn by the girl and thus red is said to be an adjective. Adjectives are very important in English Grammar as they help in differentiating the nouns from one another.

 

 

There are various kinds of adjectives depending on the usage. Some of the major types of adjectives along with some illustrative examples are explained below:

- Adjectives of Quality: These adjectives answer “what kind”. They describe the noun and help in knowing the characteristics of the noun. For example:

Amsterdam is a beautiful city.
Thames is a large river.
Australia is the smallest continent.

In all the examples given, the words beautiful, large and smallest describe the nature of the mentioned things or places or cities and so on. Thus, these adjectives are known as adjectives of quality.

- Adjectives of Quantity: These are the adjectives that help in quantifying the nouns or pronouns. They, however, do not provide with exact numbers and rather give us an approximate amount. For example:

The English army has many soldiers.
I only have a little money left.
They went and bought enough food for us.

The words marked in bold, clearly signify an approximate amount and thus these adjectives come under the category of adjectives of quantity.

- Adjectives of Number: These adjectives specify a number to the nouns or pronouns and give us a definite amount of the concerned item. For example:

I have ten apples with me.
She gave the beggar three bowls of rice.
Mary has seven sisters.

In the above example, the words marked in bold clearly signify the number of apples, bowls of rice and sisters respectively, and thus these words come under the category of adjectives of number.

- Demonstrative Adjectives: This category of adjectives make use of words like This, That, Those and These and are used to indicate some particular object or a person. For example:

This pencil belongs to my sister.
That painting is mine.
Those mangoes belong to our neighbor.

In all the examples, the words marked in bold signify or indicate to some particular object and tell us their relation with some other noun or pronoun.

- Interrogative Adjectives: This category deals with those words which are used to ask questions regarding the nouns or in relation to them. For example:

Whose phone is this?
What were you talking about?
Where were you going?

All these sentences are asking  questions to a noun or a pronoun and the words marked in bold are known as the interrogative adjectives.

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