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 forms for masculine and feminine: pleasant, idealistic, hypocritical, agile. This doesn’t mean they lack gender, as they maintain consistency with either masculine or feminine when used with other words: a (male) unhappy / a (female) unhappy. They simply don’t mark this distinction with a specific morpheme.
When adjectives do have distinct forms for gender, it’s indicated by the morpheme -o for masculine and -a for feminine: mal-o / mal-a; nervi-o / nervi-a; operari-o / operari-a; franc-és / franc-esa.
Number
To agree with the noun in number, the adjective uses identical morphemes: 0 for singular and -s / -es for plural. Examples: agradabl-e-0 / agradabl-e-s; idealist-a-0 / idealist-a-s; ágil-0 / ágil-es; franc-és-0 / franc-es-es.
Only a few adjectives maintain the same form for singular and plural; these end in -s and have an acute accent. Examples: un billete gratis / varios billetes gratis.
Graduation
Adjectives express qualities that are usually adjustable, meaning they can be presented as more or less intense: 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 ceasing to be adjectives: *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 types of words can also be graded: some nouns, like a real man, very mother, or certain adverbs like very far, quite close. So, we can say that gradation is associated with certain semantic features of words rather than any particular category.
Several procedures allow language to express the degree of an adjective, i.e., differences in the intensity of the quality it designates. The fundamental ones are:
- Synthetic or morphological: by adding affixes, either suffixes (buenísimo) or prefixes (superguapo, requeteguapo).
- Analytical or grammatical: using adverbs that modify the adjective and form a phrase with the adjective as its core (see Section 6). Examples: very big, bigger than…, less big than…, as big as…, (the) biggest…
In terms of meaning, you can grade or quantify the quality expressed by the adjective by establishing some kind of comparison or by expressing a high degree of that quality. In the first case, we speak of comparative degree; in the second, of superlative degree. When the word is not quantified, it is said to be in the positive degree. Thus, we can identify the following degrees of an adjective:
a) Positive: the adjective does not express any gradation, appears unchanged, and simply expresses the possession of a quality. Examples: an entertaining book, a happy man.
b) Comparative: the intensity of the quality 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 comparison:
- 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 different types:
- Absolute superlative: it is expressed through both syntactic and morphological processes:
- Analytical superlative: it is built with adverbs like very, extremely, incredibly, terribly…
- Synthetic superlative: it is expressed by the suffixes -ísimo, -érrimo, and also some prefixes like super-, extra-, re-, archi-.
- Relative superlative (also called “comparative of excellence”): it indicates the member or members of a group that are distinguished from others by having a quality to a greater extent. It is 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 de: 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 a distinct lexeme without a corresponding positive degree adjective. It is therefore a lexical procedure. These adjectives, however, can also express the degree through regular syntactic mechanisms.
Meaning
As mentioned above, from a semantic standpoint, adjectives describe qualities or properties of things, compared to nouns, which designate classes of beings. It should be noted that this definition holds for qualifying adjectives, but there are adjectives that do not denote qualities or properties; these are called relational adjectives.
Such 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. So, bovine means something ‘belonging to cattle,’ paternal means something ‘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 it’s relational in nervous breakdown, so we can say very nervous responses but not *very nervous breakdown; musical is a qualifying adjective in musical verse and a relational adjective in musical education, so very musical verse is acceptable but *very musical education is not. Moreover, in some cases, we find pairs of adjectives, one qualifying and one relational, which have the same lexical base (and therefore similar meaning) but a different suffix: 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 meeting, but it can also be understood as ‘family reunification,’ in which case the word would have a relational meaning.
Function
As noted above with the noun, the adjective’s function is to be the core of its phrase: the adjectival phrase (AP). As such, it can be modified by other words, such as quantifiers functioning as adverbs, and prepositional phrases and subordinate clauses, primarily functioning as complements. Example: very difficult to do. We will 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, so the reference of the noun is defined and restricted to those who possess the property designated by the adjective: Give me the blue pen. The adjective blue distinguishes the pen the speaker is asking for 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 this type of breeze from others. An adjective used in this way is called an epithet.
Position
Although it is often the case that specifying adjectives are placed after the noun and explanatory adjectives before it, this is not always the case. For example, in he had a cold reception, 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 follow or precede the noun it modifies. The choice of pre- or post-nominal position is determined more by semantic, stylistic, and rhythmic factors than by morphosyntactic ones.
However, some adjectives have a fixed position. The aforementioned relational adjectives are always post-nominal: economic problems / *the problems economic. Furthermore, usage has determined that certain constructions have crystallized in which the adjective is necessarily in a particular 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 old, a simple idea / an idea simple, a poor man / man poor, a great woman / woman great.