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I’m revisiting/studying about adjectives in “Adjectives” at Capital Community College Guide to Grammar and Writing. First I learn that articles are adjectives, but then there follows a paragraph in which all adjectives in a quote from Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel are highlighted.

Interestingly, the first thing I noticed was that the articles were not being highlighted as adjectives. Further reading, the farmer is described as one who comes weekly with printed butter, eggs, and milk but this is also not highlighted as adjective.

More importantly I began to contemplate that when more information is provided about any object, it could be regarded as adjective. For instance along the last lines, there is bakery-oven in the wind and I’m thinking in the wind should also be an adjective, but then that may result to concluding that smell of India in the smell of India tea could also be argued to be an adjective, and I’m feeling like I now have a distorted view of what adjectives really are. Could someone help me out? I’m also looking for best possible exhaustive references for learning about adjectives and other parts of speech. Thanks.

MetaEd
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Chibueze Opata
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  • I know I got away with asking What exactly is an “adverb”?, but I really think this one is too broad. Apart from anything else, some people would say adjectives are just the particular subclass of adverbs that modify nouns (adverbs certainly modify more than just verbs). But the short answer is that if a word or phrase modifies/qualifies a (pro)noun in a specific context, then in that context it's an adjective or adjectival phrase. – FumbleFingers Nov 15 '12 at 02:19
  • Short answer: an adjective is a single word which 'modifies"--describes--a noun. Getting much more deeply into it than that will almost certainly violate the requirement that "Your questions should be reasonably scoped.". Many books have been written on this subject. A good starting point for traditional treatment is Chapters 20-23 in this. I invite you to support this projected site for English language learners. – StoneyB on hiatus Nov 15 '12 at 02:29
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    @FumbleFingers: I think this question is fine and interesting, because of the concrete examples. Don't you like my answer? – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Nov 15 '12 at 03:46
  • @Cerberus: Each to their own - if OP's "concrete examples" inspire you then I suppose that's good. I have no idea what bakery-oven in the wind means at all, let alone what grammatical classification it falls into. Your idea that OP's smell of India could be seen as a (hyphenated?) adjectival phrase modifying tea is interesting, but I simply don't believe that's what he meant. I notice you didn't address the even more perplexing problem of OP's printed butter (Give it a go! I'd love to see your take on how "printed" can adjectivally modify "butter"! :) – FumbleFingers Nov 15 '12 at 04:05
  • @FumbleFingers: What else could the India thing mean? // I have no answer to the printed butter, alas. But participles are clearly adjectival, so... – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Nov 15 '12 at 04:07
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    @FumbleFingers and Cerberus, wikipedia has it... – Alain Pannetier Φ Nov 15 '12 at 04:09
  • Awesome, @Alain! So okay - print butter was in use from 1791 to 1949 (but apparently become largely obsolete in late C19 when greaseproof paper took over). I suppose that's the same thing as *printed butter, but I have to wonder whether OP is being entirely serious when he cites who comes weekly with printed butter, eggs, and milk* as a typical example of a phrase he thinks should be classified as "an adjective". – FumbleFingers Nov 15 '12 at 04:20
  • It depends how you slice it. Things like articles, determiners, and quantifiers are in modern grammars usually classified as something distinct from adjectives. These may be three class, or they may all of them fall into just one umbrella class with subclasses. They do not work like adjectives apart from being applied to nouns; they have special rules and can’t be used used any which way. – tchrist Nov 15 '12 at 04:48
  • lost Internet connection so couldn't come to clarify earlier, I wanted to know whether the page was correct in its assertions and if there was somewhere better I could get to understand about adjectives... thankfully Cerberus answered it to some extent. The motive of the question was to find out if there was a rule or pattern for identifying all forms of it. – Chibueze Opata Nov 15 '12 at 05:47
  • @FumbleFingers lol, I didn't copy the whole paragraph from the page, bakery oven in the wind is part of a sentence extracted from the said book, so I'm arguing since 'in the wind' is telling about bakery-oven, isn't it an adjective/adjectival too? Looks like someone edited my question & de-emphasized them. – Chibueze Opata Nov 15 '12 at 06:04
  • @Chibueze: Well, you must admit they're "provocative" examples in the context of your question. You could have just cited in “Adjectives” at Capital Community College Guide to Grammar and Writing from your own first sentence. As Cerberus implies, that's just another "adjectival phrase", if you want to look at it that way. But I don't think you can say anything that provides "more information about any object" is therefore "adjectival". If we allow that I'm "objective", then in "Fumblefingers disagrees", for example, not many people would accept "disagrees" as an adjective! – FumbleFingers Nov 15 '12 at 13:04

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As to articles, they are conventionally considered a class of their own; but you could say they are much like demonstrative adjectives/pronouns (this/that/these/those), so they are an unusual kind of pronoun; or you could say they are an unusual kind of adjective, because they do modify nouns and cannot normally function as a noun themselves, just like normal adjectives, and just like demonstrative adjectives/pronouns. But we just call them articles. The boundaries between parts of speech / word classes are not always clear: they are just a human invention to better understand language—not a clear-cut Ding an sich (see Kant).

As to who/that... clauses, we call those relative clauses or attributive clauses. The word attributive usually means "modifying a noun or noun phrase". Relative clauses do modify a noun, but they do not exhibit most of the other properties of adjectives. An adjective is normally:

  • A single word

  • Modifying a noun

  • Normally not used without a noun

  • Normally in front of a noun

However, you could say anything modifying a noun or noun phrase is adjectival. In that sense, a relative clause is certainly adjectival. But I just wouldn't call it an actual adjective.

As to an oven in the wind, this does not seem to satisfy enough of the above criteria, but it is certainly attributive, because it does modify a noun (phrase).

In the case of Smell-of-India tea, I think the correct spelling/rendering is like this; when such a phrase is used in front of a noun, it is conventionally hyphenated and considered an adjective. Unless you didn't mean a tea of the type "Smell of India".

Cerberus - Reinstate Monica
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  • I think OP's phrases are nonsense, and that it's a bit pointless trying to deconstruct or assign meaning to them. The rest is all true, I'm sure. But to my mind, the only bit that really answers anything you could reasonably call "the question" is "anything modifying a noun or noun phrase is adjectival". – FumbleFingers Nov 15 '12 at 04:28
  • huh? what happened to my comment here earlier? Guess it's not important anymore. thanks for your wonderful contribution @Cerberus. – Chibueze Opata Nov 15 '12 at 13:56