Adjectives

At the general level, ‘adjective’ is applied to a grammatically distinct word class in a language having the following properties:

(a) It contains among its most central members the morphologically simplest words denoting properties or states; among the most frequent and salient are those relating to size, shape, colour, age, evaluation (“good”, “bad”, etc.) and the like.

(b) Its members are characteristically used either predicatively (very often as complement to the verb “be”) or attributively, as modifier within NP structure.

(c) It is the class, or one of the classes, to which the inflectional category of grade applies most characteristically in languages having this category. (Adjectives often carry such other inflections as case, gender, number, but secondarily, by agreement, rather than being the primary locus for them.)

Whereas it is generally accepted that all languages distinguish grammatically between nouns and verbs, not all languages have a distinct adjective class. In languages which do, there is a tendency for verbs to be dynamic (denoting actions, events, etc.), adjectives static; note in this connection that in English adjectives generally occur very much more readily in the non-progressive construction than in the progressive, whereas this is not so with the majority of verbs (so that while Ed moved and Ed was moving are equally natural, Ed was tall and Ed was being tall are not).