By:
Mubarak Abdessalami
Shall we call him the emperor of Adjective could at the same time be:
• • • • • • • •
language?
Mr.
The manager of a large company. The maestro of a big orchestra. The leader of a gang. The whiz of an organization. The supervisor of all language transactions The Chameleon of the language jungle. The chief of an armed squad. Etc ...
To speak or write correctly no one in the language empire is willing to help but Adjectives certainly are. They are the only monopole that can push things forward and urge events to happen in the way it pleases the writer or the speaker. They have to do with all the "good" and "bad” things that are to be done or described. They also have the ability as to make ugly things beautiful. Mr. Adjective however is the mastermind behind a lot of "funny" almost visual effects that happen in language. All sentences invite adjectives whenever they decide to hold a "party" because the adjective and his "orchestra" are surely making it "lovely ", "exciting" and "sensational ". The dull sentence "ceremony" is the one void of "adjectives and band". He also is a magician. When the adjective begins performing his operations on sentences, it is a lot of changes and surprises that are expected to turn out. With a single stroke from his 1
"suffixes", Mr. Adjective can make an employed person "jobless"; and with his magic stick, he can turn an intelligent person "brainless". Suffixes are not the only tools that the adjective uses to convert nouns and verbs into " ". He also uses prefixes effectively. Happy people can quickly become "unhappy"; helpful ones become "unhelpful" and so on. In a word this adjective's gang is countless and it is making a lot of ravages in the body of language. Mr. Adjective has a large trained gang. Most of the members of the gang are close relatives to him. Comparatives and superlatives are his left and right-hand men. Adverbs are good and trustful executives in his large company. They are always ready to operate for him; If you don't like to do a good job, you can do it well thanks to the Adverb Section Service". Mr. Adjective uses camouflage in some of his operations. "The fast car runs fast": In this example he works as both an adjective and an adverb. The Chameleon-like adjective is greatly amazing. He sometimes permits to nouns to achieve their projects on some sorts of derivations through him. Take for instance the ambitious verb "to clean" who wants to become a noun. He has first to pass through the adjective to be "clean", e.g.: "a clean room". After that the adjective gives him the "visa" to go to the land of adverbs to have a new nationality and becomes "cleanly" to eventually reach his goal and get the new identity "cleanliness" so as to be accepted as a noun. The famous Mr. Adjective is also there to serve you to point to something you want to 2
show somebody else. You cannot demonstrate something unless the demonstrative adjectives are present. These hardworking elements of language are startling. They can make the difference between one and many targeted things. Your target, be it one or numerous, near or far away, the adjective is always ready to serve you. He makes at your disposition four of his best soldiers, notably: [This, That, These and Those]: "Look at that man with those funny spectacles who wants to buy these books on this desk." On the other hand, every user of language knows well that each adjective belongs to one of the six fractions of the gang. One of them is the "distributive" fraction that specifies among a group who share the same taste or quality, "Every student wants either tea or coffee. Some of them like neither." Moreover, adjectives of "quantity" also can make selections in the field of choice. They also can count well, "Some people have got many books; some others have only a few. But most people have no books at all." Books are countable. What about uncountable items? It is not here that the adjective could be defective, "There is much water in the bottle. But there isn't any in the glass". Thus, on all levels, the adjective is omnipresent. No other grammar element is as active as the adjective. 3
If one thinks that it is possible to avoid using an adjective, one may not be quite righteous. Even in questions, Interrogative adjectives are there, present, and ready to help. [Which, whose, what] are only samples of the various trained elements the famous powerful adjective could put under your service to assist you asking correct questions. The troops of the adjective army are the most useful. They can give each of us his share. This is my part whereas that one is her part. So you have to look for your part because everybody has got his part. The others prefer not to take their parts so it is our part now. Each one of these possessive adjectives plays its role quite perfectly. To conclude, Sentences void of adjectives are not normal ones except for some trivial ones. However, a sentence with all the adjectives is not normal either. Let's try to make a sentence in which all the members of the adjective gang are present. It will surely be a hilarious feast. "Whose is that nice cat taking some rest on my car? Every one should guess".
The adjectives are seen by grammarians as complementary parts of speech that just foster an utterance meaning, decorate it or give it a supplementary rhyme. But adjectives are so important that some questions depend completely
4
on them to display meaningful language as only adjectives can answer it. We have previously talked about the marvels with which the adjective decorates language. In this paper we will make our way towards detecting the magic side of this part of speech. Some languages like Chinese are void of adjectives; what a pity! The intellectual magic of the adjective is so funny that we will see it in terms of two far from each other funny theories. The first explanation will take Philosophy as a medium whereas the second approach will borrow technology to explain the marvellous power of the adjective. Philosophy The adjective of quality exists in some questions by force. Once the question is answered the adjective shows up and it exists by action. To illustrate let's use philosophy and compare the adjective existence to fire in a match. Philosophically speaking fire exists in a match in two ways, first when the match is virgin; the fire exists by force, which means that it needs some force (scratching) to show up. When scratch the match, fire immediately comes up. When the match is lit, obviously fire exists in the match by action. The questions in question are the host of the adjective passive or active. I admit it is hard to follow, yet with some practical examples things will get clearer. Before we can give examples let's check the other way of comparison, I mean the technological way.
5
Trojan Adjective We can compare the adjective to a virus in a software program. Like the Trojan horse virus the adjective is there until it is activated once the program file is open. So the virus dwells in the program passively but once you venture to use it the virus manifests immediately and becomes active. The activation of the virus depends greatly on your decision about what to do with the software. Illustrations: Do you know that some questions couldn't be answered but only by adjectives of quality? And, as you know, the adjectives of quality are largely meant to describe. Description however goes into categories. In this illustration, we'll deal only with two namely "appearance" and "personality" or "character". Suppose you want someone to describe someone else, your question should tell him or her if you wanted that person to describe the physical features or the qualities and virtues. The host questions are respectively: 1. What does someone or something look like? 2. What is someone or something like? The question number one once answered a range of special "appearance" descriptive adjectives are activated: tall, short, fat, obese, slim, thin, beautiful, handsome, pretty, good-looking, overweight, strong, weak, ugly and so on. The question number two on the other hand triggers personality imaging: hardworking, nice, 6
nasty, nervous, shy, kind, helpful, smart, moody, intelligent, mad, crazy and so on. Do you have any idea about adjectives are hidden inside the question?
how many following
What's the weather like? There are as many as forty without exaggeration. This is the most known question which represents an ideal lodge that provides the perfect nest for the adjective's hibernation. Once answered a flow of proper and figurative, broad and explicit adjectives burst out successively. And imagine people from all over the world answered your question; here is what you'd likely get: Weather Adjectives * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
arid bad bitter blusterous balmy calm cold cloudy crummy clear close damp dead dark drizzly dry foggy freezing 7
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
frosty good hot humid hazy icy mild misty muggy rainy raw revolting sunny stormy snow steamy showery scorching sultry tempestuous warm wet windy
CONCLUSION Finally from philosophy to technology, the invisible adjective has always been good at keeping a comfortable web for its subsistence. It imposes itself whenever you want to describe or image someone or something. Your adjective repertoire should be rich otherwise you'll always come short in your answers. Mubarak Abdessalami © Abdessalami On_Line All about adjectives: http://www.angelfire.com/ab6/sdi_bari/adj.html#top
8
