Adjectives

She was scared that they would find her.

Conclusion

The subject of our investigation was adjectives. What we have learnt about adjectives is that most English adjectives have comparative and superlative forms. These are generally constructed in one of two ways: either by suffixes (big, bigger, biggest) or by the use of the grammatical particles more and most. We have inves

tigatedthat some adjectives have suppletive forms in their comparison, such as good, better, best. Comparative and superlative forms apply only to the base form of the adjective, so that duplicate forms like most biggest or worser are nonstandard (although lesser is sometimes permitted as a variant of less). A few adjectives have no comparative but a superlative with -most: uppermost, westernmost, etc. Also it has its own degrees, such as comparison, etc. Those such as male, female, extant and extinct which express "absolute" qualities do not admit comparisons: one animal cannot be more extinct than another. Similarly in a planktonic organism the adjective planktonic simply means plankton-type; there are no degrees or grades of planktonic. Other cases are more debatable. Grammatical prescriptivists frequently object to phrases such as more perfect on the grounds that something either is perfect or it is not. However, many speakers of English accept the phrase as meaning more nearly perfect. An adjective that causes particular controversy in this respect is unique. The formulations more unique and most unique are guaranteed to raise the hackles of purists. Which English adjectives are compared by -er/-est and which by more/most is a complex matter of English idiom. Generally, shorter adjectives (including most monosyllabic adjectives), Anglo-Saxon words, and shorter, fully domesticated French words (e.g. noble) use the suffixes -er/-est. Adjectives with two syllables vary. Some take either form, and the situation determines the usage. For example, one will see commoner and more common, depending on which sounds better in the context. Two-syllable adjectives that end in the sound [i], most often spelled with y, generally take -er/-est, e.g., pretty : prettier : prettiest. It was pleasant to investigate adjectives and we think that it is not the end of its investigation. We will continue this theme on our diploma work. Thank you for spending time on reading our course work!

Appendix

For my practical task I decided to find something extraordinary what we didn’t learn at school and at university also. It is eponymous adjective!

An eponymous adjective is an adjective which has been derived from the name of a person, real or fictional. Persons from whose name the adjectives have been derived are called eponyms.Following is a list of eponymous adjectives in English.

· Aaronic — Aaron (as in Aaronic Priesthood)

· Abbasid — Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib (as in Abbasid Dynasty)

· Abelian — Niels Henrik Abel (as in Abelian group)

· Abrahamic — Abraham (as in Abrahamic religions)

· Achillean — Achilles, of Greek mythology

· Adamic — Adam (as in Adamic language); also Adamite (as in pre-Adamite race)

· Addisonian — Thomas Addison (as in Addisonian crisis)

· Adlerian — Alfred Adler (as in Classical Adlerian psychology)

· Aegean — Aegeus, of Greek mythology (as in Aegean Sea)

· Aeolian — Aeolus, of Greek mythology (as in Aeolian Islands)

· Aeschylean — Aeschylus

· Aldine — Aldus Manutius (as in Aldine Press)

· Alexandrine — Alexander the Great (as in Alexandrine verse); also Alexandrian (as in Alexandrian period)

· Amperian — André-Marie Ampère (as in Amperian loop)

· Antonian — St. Anthony the Great (as in Antonian monasticism); Antoninus Pius (as in Nervan-Antonian dynasty)

· Antonine — Antoninus Pius (as in Antonine Wall); Marcus Aurelius See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_adjectives_in_English#See_also

Bibliography

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2.“Morphology of the English language”А.I.Smirnitcky. Moscow, 1959 y.

3.“Theoretical grammar of the English language” B.S. Khaimovich, B.I. Rogovskaya. Moscow, 1967 y.

4. Baker, Mark. 2005. Lexical Categories - Verbs, nouns and adjectives. Cambridge University Press

5.Dixon, R. M. W. (1977). Where have all the adjectives gone? Studies in Language, 1, 19-80.

6.Dixon, R. M. W. (1994). Adjectives. In R. E. Asher (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (pp. 29-35). Oxford: Pergamon Press. ISBN 0-08-035943-4. (Republished as Dixon 1999).

7.Dixon, R. M. W. (1999). Adjectives. In K. Brown & T. Miller (Eds.), Concise encyclopedia of grammatical categories (pp. 1-8). Amsterdam: Elsevier. ISBN 0-08-043164-X.

8.Warren, Beatrice. (1984). Classifying adjectives. Gothenburg studies in English (No. 56). Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. ISBN 91-7346-133-4.

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