Just as we talked about what nouns are, today we want to provide information about adjectives. A type of words that we have to say belong to an open class, that is, they increase according to the evolution of society, which is why today we use new adjectives such as: cybernetic or disruptive.
An intrinsic characteristic of adjectives is that they agree in gender and number with the nouns they accompany. It is said the boy is handsome and the girls are pretty.
Adjectives actually have neither gender nor number, but are made to agree with the noun. A concordance that has several forms.
As for the gender, there are some that have no variation, that is, they are invariant of gender, such as cheerful or green. While others do have their presentation in male and female: happy and happy, red and red.
At the same time that they work the same as nouns to differentiate singular and plural, that is, an –s, -es is added.
The most obvious function of adjectives is to express a quality of nouns. There are the examples of beautiful, red or brave. However, this is only applicable to qualifying adjectives. But there's more.
For example there are the adjectives of relationship or belonging. Much more common than we think. no more goingfar, mental relative to mind or musical relative to music.
In addition there are the national adjectives that allude to an origin or provenance, be it a country, a city or a small region: Cuban, Mendoza or Alcarreña.
And there are more types, like the quasi-determinatives, whose definition already tells us that they are words very close to determiners. We are talking about adjectives like next, first or last.
Except for this type of quasi-terminatives and demonyms, the rest of the adjectives have their own characteristic that nouns lack. They have different degrees: positive, comparative and superlative degree.
First, the positive degree is its basic form: bad or cheap.
The comparative is when those same adjectives are accompanied by adverbs like more, less, as or equal to. And they are used for comparisons of superiority: this car is cheaper than that one. Of inferiority: Pedro is less bad than Juan. Or equality: My car is as cheap as yours, Pedro is just as bad as Juan.
Nevertheless, several adjectives must be mentioned that do not admit comparison, since they are implicit in their meaning: better, lesser, worse, inferior, greater, superior.
And finally there are the adjectives in the superlative degree. They are those that are quantified to indicate the highest degree of a quality. Basically they are accompanied by the adverb muy or the suffixes –ísimo, -érrimo:
Very poor, extremely poor, extremely poor.
However,we will talk about superlatives more abundantly in a later post.
