Читать книгу Collins Good Grammar - Graham King - Страница 25

Life without adjectives would be difficult, frustrating and extremely dull, because adjectives describe and modify things:

hot, freezing, beautiful, hairy, user-friendly, brainless, distasteful, pathogenic, pliable

Some adjectives give themselves away by their endings: -ing, -y, -less, -ful, -ic and so on. They can also end with -ly which can cause us to confuse them with adverbs, which often end with the same suffix.

Simply put, adjectives add something to nouns and pronouns by modifying –

It was a dreary match.

We made a late start.

or by extending or reinforcing a noun’s descriptive power –

It was an obvious mistake.

The lady possessed hypnotic charm.

You’ll see that all the adjectives in the examples so far have come before the noun, but this need not always be the case:

The lady’s charm was hypnotic.

There is a fuller discussion of adjectives and how to use them on page 120.