Can anyone help me identifying the type of adjective in the following sentence?

Question

"He is a beautiful boy."

I know that if an adjective is used before the noun, it is known as attributive, but here he is a pronoun and the adjective is used after the verb is. It's a little confusing as to what should I call the adjective in use- attributive or predicative? Is there any other term?

Does this answer your question? How to tell if an adjective is attributive or predicative [EFL context]? — livresque, Dec 24 '22 at 01:43
Not really, they did mention 'gala' as an attributive adjective in - It was a gala party. But they didn't tell me how exactly. I'm disoriented due to the presence of pronoun here, not able to tell whether it is attributive or predicative and why though? Can you please tell me? — user469769, Dec 24 '22 at 02:13
But the pronoun makes no difference, because the adjective is "attached" to the noun ("boy" here) and not to the pronoun. Please see my answer below. — equin0x80, Dec 24 '22 at 04:26
The simple answer is that "beautiful" modifies "boy" within the predicative NP "a beautiful boy". — BillJ, Dec 24 '22 at 14:22

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 24 '22 at 04:25

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This is attributive usage. "Boy" is the noun to which the adjective is applied; it's "beautiful boy", and the adjective is coming first. If you said "the boy is beautiful" then it would be predicative.

answered Dec 24 '22 at 04:25

equin0x80

613

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The word the OP is searching for is 'modifier'. "Beautiful" modifies "boy" in the NP "a beautiful boy". The whole NP is, of course, predicative. – BillJ Dec 24 '22 at 14:24

Can anyone help me identifying the type of adjective in the following sentence?

1 Answers1