| 词组 | adjectives |
| 释义 | adjectives 1. Under the heading 2. For those to whom some of the descriptive terminology of adjectives may be unfamiliar, we will mention here that there are two kinds of adjectives, from the standpoint of their position in the sentence. Their conventional names are used from time to time in articles in this book. Adjectives that stand in front of the nouns they modify are attributive adjectives: • The full and careful report was published. When the adjectives follow a form of be or a linking verb (or copula), they are predicate adjectives: • The report that was published was full and careful. Appositive adjectives may follow their noun, or they may precede it and its other modifiers (such as an article or possessive), often as part of a longer phrase: • The report, full and careful, was published. Full and careful in its attention to detail, the report was published in a national magazine. 3. Idiomatic placement of adjectives. Harper 1975, 1985 points out that some precisians—"nit-pickers" is Harper's word—object to the illogical placement of adjectives in such expressions as "a hot cup of coffee,""a brand-new pair of shoes." The argument is that it's the coffee that's hot, the shoes that are brand-new. Similarly objectionable is your leisurely cup of coffee after dinner. Harper points out that the placement of these adjectives is idiomatically correct, so the nitpickers may be ignored. Partridge 1942 cites an authority who points out the absurdity of "stylish gentlemen's suits." In his zeal for logic, the critic has lost sight of both sense and idiom. Gentlemen's suits is for all practical purposes a unit. To try to separate it with a modifier—"gentlemen's stylish suits"—is to violate normal English word order and so create an utterly unnecessary bump in the road down which your thought and your readers' attention are supposed to be traveling together. 4. Adjectives as nouns. Adjectives are used as nouns essentially in two ways: as noncount nouns to indicate a quality or a number of a group having a quality—the beautiful, the sublime, the just, the unemployed—and as count nouns—moderns, an all-time high, the ancients, big-city dailies. Evans 1957 has a long article discussing these. The noncount use, which some grammarians refer to as "the absolute use of the adjective," seems to have excited little discussion in usage books. The count nouns, however, have drawn the attention of Harper 1985, which devotes a usage panel question to the propriety of a handful of advertising uses such as a toothpaste that leaves a "clean in your mouth" and a washing machine with a special device for washing "your délicates." There is no principle involved in this sort of discussion; the strained syntax of advertising is used solely to catch attention and evoke a predictable response. Whether délicates will join unmentionables in the dictionary only time will tell. 5. adjectives as nouns See adjectives 4. |
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