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46-398: In its early use, the word naïve meant "natural or innocent", and did not connote ineptitude. As a French adjective , it is spelled naïve , for feminine nouns, and naïf , for masculine nouns. As a French noun, it is spelled naïveté . It is sometimes spelled "naïve" with a diaeresis , but as an unitalicized English word, "naive" is now the more usual spelling. "naïf" often represents

92-666: A calque of Ancient Greek : ἐπίθετον ὄνομα (surname) , romanized :  epítheton ónoma , lit.   'additional noun' (whence also English epithet ). In the grammatical tradition of Latin and Greek, because adjectives were inflected for gender, number, and case like nouns (a process called declension ), they were considered a type of noun. The words that are today typically called nouns were then called substantive nouns ( nōmen substantīvum ). The terms noun substantive and noun adjective were formerly used in English but are now obsolete. Depending on

138-559: A must-see movie ; their can-do attitude . Verbal and deverbal adjectives can often also be used as predicate (rather than attributive) adjectives, as in The game was exciting ; The cat was sitting on the fence . Deverbal adjectives may form further derivatives, such as adverbs ( excitedly , interestingly ). English has analogous types of verbal nouns (truly verbal kinds — gerunds and infinitives — and deverbal nouns ). Deverbal nouns may also be used attributively, as noun adjuncts , as in

184-565: A part of speech (word class) in most languages . In some languages, the words that serve the semantic function of adjectives are categorized together with some other class, such as nouns or verbs . In the phrase "a Ford car", "Ford" is unquestionably a noun but its function is adjectival: to modify "car". In some languages adjectives can function as nouns: for example, the Spanish phrase " un rojo " means "a red [one]". As for "confusion" with verbs, rather than an adjective meaning "big",

230-1201: A swimming competition . For more details of the usage of some of the above verb forms, see Uses of non-finite verbs in English . Japanese allows attributive finite verbs, and the following characteristics of Japanese are common among verb-final languages. For example, in Japanese , predicative verbs come at the end of the clause, after the nouns, while attributive verbs come before the noun. These are mostly equivalent to relative clauses in English; Japanese does not have relative pronouns like who , which , or when : 昨日 Kinō yesterday あの ano that 人が hito-ga person 歩いた 。 aruita . walked 昨日 あの 人が 歩いた 。 Kinō ano hito-ga aruita . yesterday that person walked That person walked yesterday. 昨日 kinō yesterday 歩いた aruita walked あの ano that 人。 hito person 昨日 歩いた あの 人。 kinō aruita ano hito yesterday walked that person That person who walked yesterday... Japanese attributive verbs inflect for grammatical aspect as shown above, and also for grammatical polarity , but usually not for politeness . For example,

276-413: A verb phrase , possibly taking objects and other dependents and modifiers that are typical of verbs; however, that verb phrase then plays the role of an attributive adjective in the larger sentence. In the following examples, the attributive verb is bolded, and the verb phrase acting as the attributive adjective is shown in italics. Deverbal adjectives often have the same form as (and similar meaning to)

322-487: A beautiful park is beautiful, but a car park is not "car". The modifier often indicates origin (" Virginia reel"), purpose (" work clothes"), semantic patient (" man eater") or semantic subject (" child actor"); however, it may generally indicate almost any semantic relationship. It is also common for adjectives to be derived from nouns, as in boyish , birdlike , behavioral (behavioural) , famous , manly , angelic , and so on. In Australian Aboriginal languages ,

368-447: A cause "), relative clauses (as in "the man who wasn't there "), and infinitive phrases (as in "a cake to die for "). Some nouns can also take complements such as content clauses (as in "the idea that I would do that "), but these are not commonly considered modifiers . For more information about possible modifiers and dependents of nouns, see Components of noun phrases . In many languages, attributive adjectives usually occur in

414-448: A deverbal adjective is the word interesting in That was a very interesting speech ; although it is derived from the verb to interest , it behaves here entirely like an ordinary adjective such as nice or long . However, some languages, such as Japanese and Chinese , can use finite verbs attributively. In such a language, the man wearing a hat might translate, word-for-word, into

460-584: A language might have a verb that means "to be big" and could then use an attributive verb construction analogous to "big-being house" to express what in English is called a "big house". Such an analysis is possible for the grammar of Standard Chinese and Korean , for example. Different languages do not use adjectives in exactly the same situations. For example, where English uses " to be hungry " ( hungry being an adjective), Dutch , French , and Spanish use " honger hebben ", " avoir faim ", and " tener hambre " respectively (literally "to have hunger",

506-420: A nominal element within a particular context. They generally do this by indicating definiteness ( a vs. the ), quantity ( one vs. some vs. many ), or another such property. An adjective acts as the head of an adjective phrase or adjectival phrase (AP). In the simplest case, an adjective phrase consists solely of the adjective; more complex adjective phrases may contain one or more adverbs modifying

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552-585: A noun, they are far more circumscribed than adjectives in their use—typically, only a single determiner would appear before a noun or noun phrase (including any attributive adjectives). This means that, in English, adjectives pertaining to size precede adjectives pertaining to age ("little old", not "old little"), which in turn generally precede adjectives pertaining to colour ("old white", not "white old"). So, one would say "One (quantity) nice (opinion) little (size) old (age) round (shape) [ or round old] white (colour) brick (material) house." When several adjectives of

598-401: A proper town (a real town, not a village) vs. They live in the town proper (in the town itself, not in the suburbs). All adjectives can follow nouns in certain constructions, such as tell me something new . In many languages, some adjectives are comparable and the measure of comparison is called degree . For example, a person may be "polite", but another person may be " more polite", and

644-688: A small closed class of adjectives, and new adjectives are not easily derived. Similarly, native Japanese adjectives ( i -adjectives) are considered a closed class (as are native verbs), although nouns (an open class) may be used in the genitive to convey some adjectival meanings, and there is also the separate open class of adjectival nouns ( na -adjectives). Many languages (including English) distinguish between adjectives, which qualify nouns and pronouns, and adverbs , which mainly modify verbs , adjectives, or other adverbs. Not all languages make this exact distinction; many (including English) have words that can function as either. For example, in English, fast

690-433: A special comparative form of the adjective. In such cases, as in some Australian Aboriginal languages , case-marking, such as the ablative case may be used to indicate one entity has more of an adjectival quality than (i.e. from —hence ABL) another. In English, many adjectives can be inflected to comparative and superlative forms by taking the suffixes "-er" and "-est" (sometimes requiring additional letters before

736-547: A specific order. In general, the adjective order in English can be summarised as: opinion, size, age or shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. Other language authorities, like the Cambridge Dictionary , state that shape precedes rather than follows age. Determiners and postdeterminers—articles, numerals, and other limiters (e.g. three blind mice)—come before attributive adjectives in English. Although certain combinations of determiners can appear before

782-414: A statement is only tentative or tendential: one might say "John is more the shy-and-retiring type", where the comparative "more" is not really comparing him with other people or with other impressions of him, but rather, could be substituting for "on the whole" or "more so than not". In Italian, superlatives are frequently used to put strong emphasis on an adjective: bellissimo means "most beautiful", but

828-486: A third person may be the " most polite" of the three. The word "more" here modifies the adjective "polite" to indicate a comparison is being made, and "most" modifies the adjective to indicate an absolute comparison (a superlative ). Among languages that allow adjectives to be compared, different means are used to indicate comparison. Some languages do not distinguish between comparative and superlative forms. Other languages allow adjectives to be compared but do not have

874-480: Is a verb that modifies (expresses an attribute of) a noun in the manner of an attributive adjective , rather than express an independent idea as a predicate . In English (and in most European languages), verb forms that can be used attributively are typically non-finite forms — participles and infinitives — as well as certain verb-derived words that function as ordinary adjectives. All words of these types may be called verbal adjectives , although those of

920-521: Is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase . Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main parts of speech of the English language, although historically they were classed together with nouns . Nowadays, certain words that usually had been classified as adjectives, including the , this , my , etc., typically are classed separately, as determiners . Examples: Adjective comes from Latin nōmen adjectīvum ,

966-503: Is already absolute in its semantics. Such adjectives are called non-comparable or absolute . Nevertheless, native speakers will frequently play with the raised forms of adjectives of this sort. Although "pregnant" is logically non-comparable (either one is pregnant or not), one may hear a sentence like "She looks more and more pregnant each day". Comparative and superlative forms are also occasionally used for other purposes than comparison. In English comparatives can be used to suggest that

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1012-519: Is an adjective in "a fast car" (where it qualifies the noun car ) but an adverb in "he drove fast " (where it modifies the verb drove ). In Dutch and German , adjectives and adverbs are usually identical in form and many grammarians do not make the distinction, but patterns of inflection can suggest a difference: A German word like klug ("clever(ly)") takes endings when used as an attributive adjective but not when used adverbially. Whether these are distinct parts of speech or distinct usages of

1058-503: Is being fronted . For example, the usual order of adjectives in English would result in the phrase "the bad big wolf" (opinion before size), but instead, the usual phrase is "the big bad wolf". Owing partially to borrowings from French, English has some adjectives that follow the noun as postmodifiers , called postpositive adjectives , as in time immemorial and attorney general . Adjectives may even change meaning depending on whether they precede or follow, as in proper : They live in

1104-973: Is called agreement or concord. Usually it takes the form of inflections at the end of the word, as in Latin : In Celtic languages , however, initial consonant lenition marks the adjective with a feminine singular noun, as in Irish : Here, a distinction may be made between attributive and predicative usage. In English, adjectives never agree, whereas in French, they always agree. In German, they agree only when they are used attributively, and in Hungarian, they agree only when they are used predicatively: Semanticist Barbara Partee classifies adjectives semantically as intersective , subsective , or nonsubsective, with nonsubsective adjectives being plain nonsubsective or privative . Attributive verb An attributive verb

1150-462: Is in fact more commonly heard in the sense "extremely beautiful". Attributive adjectives and other noun modifiers may be used either restrictively (helping to identify the noun's referent, hence "restricting" its reference) or non-restrictively (helping to describe a noun). For example: Here "difficult" is restrictive – it tells which tasks he avoids, distinguishing these from the easy ones: "Only those tasks that are difficult". Here difficult

1196-435: Is non-restrictive – it is already known which task it was, but the adjective describes it more fully: "The aforementioned task, which (by the way) is difficult." In some languages, such as Spanish , restrictiveness is consistently marked; for example, in Spanish la tarea difícil means "the difficult task" in the sense of "the task that is difficult" (restrictive), whereas la difícil tarea means "the difficult task" in

1242-882: Is that some nominals seem to semantically denote entities (typically nouns in English) and some nominals seem to denote attributes (typically adjectives in English). Many languages have participle forms that can act as noun modifiers either alone or as the head of a phrase. Sometimes participles develop into functional usage as adjectives. Examples in English include relieved (the past participle of relieve ), used as an adjective in passive voice constructs such as "I am so relieved to see you". Other examples include spoken (the past participle of speak ) and going (the present participle of go ), which function as attribute adjectives in such phrases as "the spoken word" and "the going rate". Other constructs that often modify nouns include prepositional phrases (as in "a rebel without

1288-651: The Bantu languages , attributive verbs are formed by the addition of the "pre-prefix" (or "initial vowel"). For example, in Luganda : This is similar to the behaviour of attributive adjectives: The attributive verb formation is the usual way of forming relatives in Luganda when the antecedent is the subject of the subordinate verb, and is sometimes called the "subject relative". Relative pronouns do exist, but they are only used for "object relatives", i.e. relative clauses where

1334-440: The French masculine, but has a secondary meaning as an artistic style . “Naïve” is pronounced as two syllables, in the French manner, and with the stress on the second one. The naïf appears as a cultural type in two main forms. On the one hand, there is 'the satirical naïf, such as Candide '. Northrop Frye suggested we might call it "the ingénu form, after Voltaire 's dialogue of that name. "Here an outsider ... grants none of

1380-496: The adjective moorrooloo 'little' in the phrase moorrooloo baawa 'little child' can stand on its own to mean 'the little one,' while the attributive noun aamba 'man' in the phrase aamba baawa 'male child' cannot stand for the whole phrase to mean 'the male one.' In other languages, like Warlpiri , nouns and adjectives are lumped together beneath the nominal umbrella because of their shared syntactic distribution as arguments of predicates . The only thing distinguishing them

1426-512: The adjective (" very strong"), or one or more complements (such as "worth several dollars ", "full of toys ", or "eager to please "). In English, attributive adjective phrases that include complements typically follow the noun that they qualify ("an evildoer devoid of redeeming qualities "). In many languages (including English) it is possible for nouns to modify other nouns. Unlike adjectives, nouns acting as modifiers (called attributive nouns or noun adjuncts ) usually are not predicative;

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1472-476: The distinction between adjectives and nouns is typically thought weak, and many of the languages only use nouns—or nouns with a limited set of adjective-deriving affix es—to modify other nouns. In languages that have a subtle adjective-noun distinction, one way to tell them apart is that a modifying adjective can come to stand in for an entire elided noun phrase, while a modifying noun cannot. For example, in Bardi ,

1518-425: The following examples: Classical Japanese: Turkish: Notice that both of these languages have a verb-final word order , and that none of them have relative pronouns. They also do not have a clear distinction between verbs and adjectives in their modern usage. For example, the word aoi , meaning "blue", effectively functions both as an adjective and as well descriptive verb, without changes in inflection: In

1564-409: The language, an adjective can precede a corresponding noun on a prepositive basis or it can follow a corresponding noun on a postpositive basis. Structural, contextual, and style considerations can impinge on the pre-or post-position of an adjective in a given instance of its occurrence. In English, occurrences of adjectives generally can be classified into one of three categories: Adjectives feature as

1610-455: The latter type (those that behave grammatically like ordinary adjectives, with no verb-like features) may be distinguished as deverbal adjectives . An example of a verbal adjective with verb-like features is the word wearing in the sentence The man wearing a hat is my father (it behaves as a verb in taking an object, a hat , although the resulting phrase wearing a hat functions like an attributive adjective in modifying man ). An example of

1656-461: The participles, but behave grammatically purely as adjectives — they do not take objects, for example, as a verb might. For example: Sometimes deverbal adjectives additionally take prefixes, as in hand-fed turkeys , uneaten food and meat-eating animals . Some compound adjectives are formed using the plain infinitive form of the verb, as in a no-go area or no-fly zone , and take-away food . Occasionally they are finite verb phrases:

1702-434: The polite form of hito ga aruita is hito ga arukimashita , but the form arukimashita hito , although grammatically correct, is perceived to be too polite and paraphrastic. As such, modern Japanese verbs commonly have the same form both in their predicative and attributive usage. Historically, however, these had been separate forms, which is still the case in languages such as Korean and Turkish , as illustrated by

1748-460: The premises which make the absurdities of society look logical to those accustomed to them", and serves essentially as a prism to carry the satirical message. Baudrillard indeed, drawing on his Situationist roots, sought to position himself as ingénu in everyday life: "I play the role of the Danube peasant: someone who knows nothing but suspects something is wrong ... I like being in the position of

1794-577: The primitive ... playing naïve ". On the other hand, there is the artistic "naïf - all responsiveness and seeming availability". Here 'the naïf offers himself as being in process of formation, in search of values and models...always about to adopt some traditional "mature" temperament' - in a perpetual adolescent moratorium . Such instances of "the naïf as a cultural image... offered themselves as essentially responsive to others and open to every invitation... established their identity in indeterminacy". Adjective An adjective ( abbreviated adj. )

1840-511: The same part of speech is a question of analysis. While German linguistic terminology distinguishes adverbiale from adjektivische Formen , German refers to both as Eigenschaftswörter ("property words"). Linguists today distinguish determiners from adjectives, considering them to be two separate parts of speech (or lexical categories ). Determiners formerly were considered to be adjectives in some of their uses. Determiners function neither as nouns nor pronouns but instead characterize

1886-516: The same type are used together, they are ordered from general to specific, like "lovely intelligent person" or "old medieval castle". This order may be more rigid in some languages than others; in some, like Spanish, it may only be a default ( unmarked ) word order, with other orders being permissible. Other languages, such as Tagalog , follow their adjectival orders as rigidly as English. The normal adjectival order of English may be overridden in certain circumstances, especially when one adjective

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1932-420: The sense of "the task, which is difficult" (non-restrictive). In English, restrictiveness is not marked on adjectives but is marked on relative clauses (the difference between "the man who recognized me was there" and "the man, who recognized me , was there" being one of restrictiveness). In some languages, adjectives alter their form to reflect the gender, case and number of the noun that they describe. This

1978-438: The suffix; see forms for far below), respectively: Some adjectives are irregular in this sense: Some adjectives can have both regular and irregular variations: also Another way to convey comparison is by incorporating the words "more" and "most". There is no simple rule to decide which means is correct for any given adjective, however. The general tendency is for simpler adjectives and those from Anglo-Saxon to take

2024-411: The suffixes, while longer adjectives and those from French , Latin , or Greek do not—but sometimes the sound of the word is the deciding factor. Many adjectives do not naturally lend themselves to comparison. For example, some English speakers would argue that it does not make sense to say that one thing is "more ultimate" than another, or that something is "most ultimate", since the word "ultimate"

2070-550: The wears a hat man . Here, the function of an attributive adjective is played by the phrase wears a hat , which is headed by the finite verb wears . This is a kind of relative clause . As mentioned above, verb forms that are used attributively in English are often called verbal adjectives, or in some cases deverbal adjectives (if they no longer behave grammatically as verbs). The truly "verbal" adjectives are non-finite verb forms: participles (present and past), and sometimes to -infinitives . These act as verbs in that they form

2116-419: The words for "hunger" being nouns). Similarly, where Hebrew uses the adjective זקוק ‎ ( zaqūq , roughly "in need of" or "needing"), English uses the verb "to need". In languages that have adjectives as a word class, it is usually an open class ; that is, it is relatively common for new adjectives to be formed via such processes as derivation . However, Bantu languages are well known for having only

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