Due

Read: Understanding English Grammar, Chapter 7
Post: Editing project

Meeting Place

We will meet in our usual classroom, Dial 153.  Please bring Understanding English Grammar.

March 26-30, 2001

We turn this week from adverbials to adjectivals.  In addition to reading the chapter on adjectivals in your book, try to finish editing the Web page that I assigned you before coming to Friday's class.  During that class, you will have time to work on this project under my guidance.
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>>American English 

Types of Adjectivals 

Resources

Understanding English Grammar describes the ten basic sentence patterns covered here.

A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language presents detailed descriptions of numerous aspects of English grammar.

Updated March 26, 2001
© Mark Canada, 2001
mark.canada@uncp.edu
 

Adjectivals

By Mark Canada
English professor, University of North Carolina at Pembroke

Take a close look at any sentence, and there's a good chance you will find an adjectival--a word or phrase that modifies a noun.  Indeed, the sentence that you just read contains five adjectivals: close, any,good, a word or phrase that modifies a noun, and that modifies a noun.  The first three are adjectives, words that can modify nouns all by themselves.  English has thousands of such words, including some of the most common words in the language: big, little, bad, red, right, and so on.  The last two adjectivals are both examples of a phrase, a group of words acting together to serve some purpose in a sentence.  Specifically, the first of these two phrases--a word or phrase that modifies a noun--is an appositive, and the second--that modifies a noun--is a relative clause.  English has several other adjectivals, as well.  The following sentences illustrate the various types of adjectivals, which appear in red:

  1. Adjectives: Dorothy's red shoes are really nice.
  2. Appositive: My friend Brian lives in New Jersey.
  3. Infinitive: He is sticking to his resolution to stay fit.
  4. Noun: Stay off of my blue suede shoes.
  5. Prepositional Phrases: Her reason for coming is out of line.
  6. Participles: The professor teaching Victorian literature is interesting.
  7. Relative Clause: I know a biologist who lives in the desert.
While all of these words and phrases can be adjectivals, they also can serve other functions in a sentence.  Infinitives, prepositional phrases, nouns, and participles, for example, all can function as adverbials.  To determine whether a word or phrase is an adjectival, decide whether it modifies a noun.  If it does, it is an adjectival.

Notice in the examples above that adjectivals generally appear in one of three places--immediately before the nouns they modify, immediately after the nouns they modify, or after a linking verb such as "to be."  In other words, unlike adverbials, which are very movable, adjectivals tend to stay close to the words they modify, except when they are being linked back to the subject.

Yet another type of adjectival is the compound adjectival--a series of words that appear before a noun and work together to modify that noun in the same way a single adjective would.  Except when the first word is an adverb ending in -ly, these adjectivals generally are hyphenated.  The following sentences contain compound adjectivals, marked in red:

  1. Compound Adjectivals: The empty-nest couple moved into a high-rise building.
  2. Compound Adjectivals: The plain-spoken man bristled at his opponent's in-your-face politics.
  3. Compound Adjectival: No one could bear to look at the wrongly accused man.
Because of their ability to package a lot of information, adjectivals are one of the most useful components of English grammar.  Indeed, mastering them can improve your rhetorical skills.  For example, if you tend to write a lot of short sentences, you might want to try packaging the information in some of these sentences in the form of adjectivals and then inserting these new adjectivals into other sentences.  One of the exercises below can help you practice this strategy.

For all of their benefits, adjectivals also cause problems for some English speakers and writers.  In particular, people often have trouble punctuating relative clauses and making verbs agree with subjects when these subjects contain certain kinds of adjectivals.  The exercises below will help you work combat these problems, as well.

Exercises

General Practice

Identifying Adjectivals: Identify all of the adjectivals in the following sentences and label each as an adjective, infinitive, noun, participle, prepositional phrase, relative clause, or compound adjectival.
  1. The really tall building on the corner belongs to an interesting family with a long history in this area.
  2. To succeed in the most challenging college courses, most students need to study hard.
  3. The district court judge ruled the shouting woman out of order.
  4. The commercial that you saw suggests that the going-out-of-business sale will end in a few days.
  5. Their youngest daughter, who just graduated from high school, has been studying ways to choose a college.

Rhetoric and Literature

Combining Sentences: While an occasional short sentence can emphasize a point or shake up the rhythm in a piece of prose, longer sentences tend to be more rhetorically effective.  One of the most useful ways to lengthen sentences that are too short is to package information in adjectivals.  Read each of the following groups of sentences.  Use what you have learned about adjectivals to convey all of the same information in a single sentence.  Finally label each adjectival in your sentence.
  1. Example: Edgar Allan Poe was an orphan.  He was raised by foster parents.  He wrote poems and stories.  Many featured characters who lost loved ones.  An orphan who was raised by foster parents, Edgar Allan Poe wrote many poems and stories featuring characters who lost loved ones.
  2. Some writers have trouble with relative clauses.  These clauses begin with relative pronouns.  They modify nouns.
  3. The actress was struggling.  She had a plan.  She wanted to make her name in musicals.  The plan failed.
  4. Annie Jump Cannon earned a degree from Wellesley College.  She became an astronomer.  Her expertise was in the area of classifying stars.  She was successful.

Editing

Subject-verb agreement
Hyphenation
Punctuating Relative Clauses