General Adjective Agreement, Graduation, Meaning, Function, and Position
General Adjective
Agreement
Both gender and number agreement are required between an adjective and the noun it modifies. Some adjectives do not have distinct morphemes for gender: pleasant, idealistic, hypocritical, agile. However, this doesn’t mean they lack gender, as they maintain consistency with either masculine or feminine when used with other words: an unhappy man / an unhappy woman. They simply don’t mark this distinction with a specific morpheme. When adjectives do have formal gender opposition, it’s indicated by the morpheme -o for masculine and -a for feminine: bad-o / bad-a; nervous-o / nervous-a; hard-working-o / hard-working-a; French-o / French-a.
Number
For number agreement, the adjective uses identical morphemes: -o for singular and -s/-es for plural. Examples: pleasant-o / pleasant-s; idealist-o / idealist-as; agile-o / agile-s; French-o / French-es. A few adjectives maintain the same form for both singular and plural; these end in -s and have a stressed final syllable. Examples: a free ticket / a number of free tickets.
Graduation
Adjectives express qualities that are usually adjustable, meaning they can be presented with varying intensity: a house can be more or less tall, more or less big. This characteristic has led to the idea that gradation is specific to adjectives. However, some clarifications are needed. Firstly, some adjectives cannot be graded without losing their adjectival nature: *very municipal, *very parental, *very civil, *very pristine, *very deadly are unacceptable expressions. Municipal, parental, marital, virgin, and deadly are adjectives. Many of these are relational adjectives (see Section 2.2). Secondly, other word types can also be graded: some nouns, like a real man, very motherly, or certain adverbs like very far, quite close. Therefore, we can say that gradation is associated with certain semantic features of words rather than a specific category.
Several linguistic procedures allow for expressing the degree of an adjective, i.e., differences in the intensity of the quality it designates. The fundamental ones are:
- Synthetic or morphological: adding affixes, either suffixes (extremely good) or prefixes (super-cute, ultra-cute).
- Analytical or grammatical: using adverbs that modify the adjective, forming a phrase with the adjective as its core (see Section 6). Examples: big, bigger than…, less big than…, as big as…, (the) biggest…
In terms of meaning, gradation can quantify the quality expressed by the adjective by establishing a comparison or expressing a high degree of that quality. In the first case, we speak of comparative degree; in the second, superlative degree. When the word is not quantified, it’s said to be in the positive degree. Thus, we can identify the following degrees of an adjective:
a) Positive: the adjective doesn’t express any gradation, appears unchanged, and simply expresses the possession of a quality. Examples: an entertaining book, a happy man.
b) Comparative: intensity is expressed in relation to the quality possessed by another element. The element being compared is often called the first term of the comparison, and the element it’s compared to is the second term. Syntactic procedures are constructed using conjunctions and adverbs. There are three variants in the comparative:
- Superiority: more innocent than a child.
- Inferiority: less hardworking than his father.
- Equality: as tall as the moon.
c) Superlative: the adjective expresses the quality in a high degree; quantification occurs with maximum intensity. There are two types:
- Absolute superlative: expressed through both syntactic and morphological processes:
- Analytical superlative: constructed with adverbs like very, extremely, incredibly, terribly…
- Synthetic superlative: expressed by suffixes -ísimo, -érrimo, and also some prefixes like super-, extra-, re-, mega-.
- Relative superlative (also called “superlative of excellence”): indicates the member(s) of a group that stand out from others by possessing a quality to a greater extent. It’s constructed with the comparative degree of the adjective (superiority or inferiority) preceded by the definite article and followed by a complement headed by the preposition of: the tallest of…, the least tall of…, the best of…, the worst of…
Some adjectives have special forms to express the degree, both comparative and absolute superlative. These are cultured Latin forms that constitute distinct lexemes without a corresponding positive degree adjective. This is a lexical procedure. However, these adjectives can also express degree through regular syntactic mechanisms.
Meaning
As mentioned above, from a semantic standpoint, adjectives describe qualities or properties of things, in contrast to nouns, which designate classes of beings. This definition applies to qualifying adjectives, but there are also adjectives that don’t denote qualities or properties; these are called relational adjectives. Relational adjectives are usually derived from nouns using suffixes like -al, -ar, -ario, or -ico. They establish connections between objects or areas, indicating that a particular meaning ‘concerns’ or ‘affects’ that object. As defined in dictionaries, these are adjectives whose meaning is ‘related to’ or ‘belonging to’ a certain entity. Thus, bovine means ‘belonging to cattle’, paternal means ‘belonging to the father’, and provincial concerns what is ‘related to the province’. These relational adjectives always precede the noun, cannot be graded, and therefore expressions like *very financial difficulties, *very presidential palace, *very electric stove are unacceptable.
Some adjectives admit a double interpretation, as qualifying and relational adjectives: nervous is qualifying in nervous responses, but relational in nervous breakdown, so we can say very nervous responses but not *very nervous breakdown. Moreover, in some cases, we find pairs of adjectives, one qualifying and one relational, with the same lexical base (and therefore similar meaning) but different suffixes: paternal (qualifying) / fatherly (relational), provincial (qualifying) / provincial (relational), muscular (qualifying) / muscular (relational), civic (qualifying) / civil (relational).
Finally, note that the dual interpretation, as qualifying and relational, can occur within a single noun phrase, resulting in an ambiguous construction. Family reunion can refer to a ‘family-type’ relationship and a relaxed, informal atmosphere, where the adjective expresses a quality of the reunion. But it can also be understood as ‘family reunification’, in which case the word would have a relational meaning.
Function
Similar to what was noted about nouns, the function of an adjective is to be the core of its phrase: the adjectival phrase (AP). As such, it can be modified by other words, such as adverbs functioning as quantifiers, and prepositional phrases and subordinate clauses, primarily functioning as complements. Example: very difficult to do. We’ll study the structure of the AP in more detail in Section 6.
As the core of an AP, the adjective specifies and completes the meaning of the noun it agrees with. It refers to the noun either directly (a quiet day) or through a verb (Luis is quiet, Luis has arrived alone).
When the adjective directly modifies the noun, it can have two different values: specifying or explanatory.
A specifying adjective indicates a property that distinguishes the being or object designated by the noun from other possibilities, thus defining and restricting the noun’s reference to those entities that possess the property designated by the adjective: Give me the blue pen. The adjective blue distinguishes the pen the speaker is requesting from other possible pens.
An explanatory adjective indicates a property of the being or object without intending to distinguish it from other beings or objects that the noun could refer to. The noun’s reference is not defined or restricted by the adjective: the soft sea breeze. Soft describes and explains how the sea breeze is, but it doesn’t differentiate it from other types of breezes. An adjective used in this way is called an epithet.
Position
Although specifying adjectives are often placed after the noun and explanatory adjectives before it, this is not always the case. For example, in he received a cold welcome, cold is specifying, and in contemplating the vast sea, vast is explanatory, as it doesn’t differentiate one type of sea from another. In general, in Spanish, the adjective can either follow or precede the noun it modifies. The choice of pre- or post-nominal position is determined by semantic, stylistic, rhythmic, and morphosyntactic factors.
However, some adjectives have a fixed position. The aforementioned relational adjectives are always post-nominal: economic problems / *the problems economic. Furthermore, usage has established certain fixed constructions where the adjective must be in a specific position. We say good taste, fixed idea, bad luck, quite rare, and not *taste good, *idea fixed, *luck bad, *rare quite.
Some adjectives change meaning depending on whether they are placed before or after the noun: old friend / friend of old, a simple idea / a mere idea, a poor man / a man of little means, a great woman / a large woman.