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What is an Adjective?
An adjective is a word used to describe the characteristics, qualities of objects, phenomena or actions, and the combination of adjectives with other words forms adjective phrases.According to the author of 'Vietnamese Grammar, Parts of Speech,' who discovered the essence of adjectives in relation to and . The author Đinh Văn Đức found that adjectives have a relationship with both nouns and verbs. He describes adjectives as a type of word that characterizes every concept expressed through nouns and verbs.
Adjectives are an important part of both Vietnamese and English languagesSimilar to adjectives in Vietnamese, adjectives in English also serve an important function with equivalent roles.
What is an Adjective Phrase?
An adjective phrase is a combination of words formed by an adjective combined with dependent words to provide additional meaning to that adjective.Adjective phrases have a more complete meaning and a more complex structure than a single adjective, but they function in a sentence similarly to an adjective.
Example: Single adjective: Intelligent, we have the adjective phrase Extremely intelligent
See more: What are pronouns? Examples, functions, and common types of pronounsFunction of Adjectives
Next, let's explore further what the function of adjectives is. In communication or literature, adjectives always maintain an undeniable importance. Adjectives are often used with verbs and nouns to describe more about the nature, characteristics, and extent of an object, event, or person.
Adjectives not only enrich the message but also help the listener or reader understand more about the mentioned object or event, and at the same time, they make the expression more flexible. There are several main functions of adjectives in a sentence, including:
- Adjectives add meaning to nouns (often in predicate position)
- Adjectives in subject or predicate positions.
Types of Adjectives
Being one of the significant parts of speech, apart from understanding what adjectives are, you also need to grasp how to classify them. In reality, there are various methods to classify adjectives in grammar.
Adjectives can be divided into two categories:
- Adjectives express characteristics of objects, phenomena, or describe actions. Examples: stable, intact, perfect, persistent, challenging, simple...
- Adjectives express characteristics of people, objects, phenomena, or describe nouns referring to people, objects, or phenomena with those characteristics. Examples: youthful, mature, secretive, fresh...
However, this classification method sometimes becomes complex and difficult to understand. Therefore, adjectives are often categorized into types.
Adjectives of State
Adjectives of state depict the current condition of an object or individual, existing within a specific period. Thus, state-describing adjectives are the words that most clearly reflect all states of humans, objects, or phenomena. Common state-describing words include: happy, sad, painful, tired, peaceful, or noisy...
Classifying Different Types of AdjectivesAdjectives of Characteristics
These are adjectives used to describe distinctive features of an object or phenomenon. These characteristics are often inherent traits of an entity such as humans, animals, objects, plants, etc. Using adjectives to describe helps listeners or readers easily visualize differences in shape, color, smell, taste, and other characteristics.
These characteristics can be divided into two main types:
- External characteristics: These are distinctive features of an object or phenomenon, recognized through sensory perceptions such as sight, touch, and taste, through factors like color, shape, and sound.
- Internal characteristics (or adjectives of quality): These are distinct traits that require observation combined with inference, abstraction, and various other cognitive factors for recognition. This includes characteristics of temperament, psychology, personality of an individual, as well as durability and value of an object.
Adjectives of Degree in Vietnamese
Expressing the degree of an action or event in a sentence, degree adjectives such as fast, slow, far, near, superficial,... are common. Apart from the two classification methods mentioned, there's another way to classify adjectives:
- Independent adjectives: This is a group of vocabulary expressing characteristics such as color, scale, shape, sound, degree... In general, these characteristics can stand alone and describe specifically about an object, phenomenon.
- Dependent adjectives: Conversely, dependent adjectives are words that are not inherently adjectives, they belong to other word classes like nouns or verbs, however, they have the ability to change class and are used as adjectives to describe the characteristics or states of an object, creating flexibility in language.
Identifying Adjectives
You've understood somewhat what adjectives are, next let's delve deeper into the signs to identify this type of word. To determine adjectives, you can rely on the following characteristics:
Often accompanied by degree words like very, extremely, much, slightly, extremely, are common expressions of adjectives.
Adjectives, essentially, are used to describe external characteristics such as size, shape, and inner personality of humans, objects, or phenomena.
Often serving as predicates in sentences
Position of Adjectives
Through the information presented earlier, we can see that in Vietnamese, adjectives typically come after nouns. However, when an adjective functions as the subject, the predicate usually comes after the adjective.
Furthermore, the predicate can be formed from a verb or a verb phrase. At the same time, in some cases, the predicate can also be a noun or a noun phrase.
Examples of Adjectives
Let's do some small example exercises to understand what adjectives are right below:
Exercise 1: Choose the appropriate adjective
Choose the suitable adjective to describe the feeling of a person after reading a good book.
Example: Refreshed
Some adjective exercisesExercise 2: Constructing sentences with comparative adjectives
Utilize comparative adjectives to compare between two objects or entities.
Example: Faster
Exercise 3: Formulate a sentence with an adjective describing appearance
Write a sentence describing the appearance of someone you know.
Example: Tall and charming
Exercise 4: Fill in the appropriate adjective in the blanks
Complete the following sentence with the appropriate adjective.
Example: The teacher teaches very ____, always creating interest for students.
Exercise 5: Formulate a sentence with positive and negative adjectives
Write two sentences, one using a positive adjective and one using a negative adjective to describe the same object or situation.
Positive Example: Happiness
Negative Example: Disappointment
Conclusion
In this article, Mytour has shared with you the content about what adjectives are in Vietnamese and English. Hopefully, these contents will be helpful to you and help you understand more about this part of speech.
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