Adjectives
Lexical definition: Words that modify and describe nouns by providing information about their quality.
Morphological behaviour
Adjectives are suffixed by comparative er or superlative est
Big, bigger, biggest
Smart, smarter, smartest
When adjectives are monosyllabic or bisyllabic, they can be suffixed with er or est.
Funny - funnier, more funny
Funny - funniest, most funny
If an adjective is made out of more than two syllables, then they cannot be suffixed with er or est. We use more and most instead.
Dangerous - more dangerous, most dangerous.
Derivational morphology
beauty - beautiful
Hope - Hopeful
Care - careful
Care - careless
Point - pointless
Mind - mindless
Danger - dangerous
caution - cautious
Create - creative
Act - active
Innovate - innovative
Economy - economical
part - partial
Economy - economic
Artist - artistic
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happy - unhappy
complete - incomplete
regular - irregular
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Syntactic behaviour
Adjectives precede a noun in English
Attributive adjectives are those that occur immediately before a noun
a beautiful sky
Predicative adjectives are those that occur after a linking verb to modify a noun
The sky is beautiful
Zawawi
Verbs are action words - they denote an action or an event.
Verbs can be inflected with ing, ed, third person 's'
Verbs can be identified by certain derivational suffixes/prefixes
Verbs can be suffixed with -able to mean can be done.
Write
wash
Syntactic behaviour:
Verbs occupy a central position in the sentence
Verbs can also occur at the beginning of the sentence in English ==> Imperative sentence
Verbs can follow some special expressions
Let's ...
Verbs come immediately after auxiliaries.
Zawawi
