GENERAL CHARACTERISTIC

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 490.

I. THE ADJECTIVE

UNIT VI

1. General characteristic.

2. The problem of the number of forms of degrees of comparison.

3. The problem of analytical forms of comparison.

4. Conversion.

The adjective is a notional part of speech which embraces words expressing different qualities of substances. The adjective is characterized by the following typical features:

a) the lexico-grammatical meaning of an attribute of a substance like size, colour, space position, material or psychic state, etc.;

b) the morphological category of degrees of comparison;

c) combinability with nouns, link-verbs, adverbs, the word one;

d) the characteristic affixes: -full,-less, -ish, -ous, pre-, un-, etc.;

e) the functions of an attribute and a predicative complement.

According to their lexical meaning adjectives fall into two groups: qualitative and relative. Qualitative adjectives denote different properties of a substance directly (e. g. warm, beautiful) while relative adjectives describe properties of a substance through their relation to other substance, or material (e. g. wooden, woolen), to place (e. g. Italian, European), to time (e. g. daily, weekly) or action (e. g. defensive, preparatory).

R. Close and some other linguists admit the existence of gradable adjectives – those which "express a condition or a quality of which there are degrees" [5, 29], and "whose meaning can be thought of in terms of a scale" [18, 83].

e. g. Good is gradable as it has a high degree (very good), an excessive degree (too good), a sufficient degree (good enough), or an insufficient degree (not good enough).

The ability to have degrees of comparison is associated only with gradable words.