Adjectives

Adjectives modify nouns. For our purposes, we're going to drop them into three different buckets:

Adjectives
Descriptive	Possessive	Participial

Furthermore, we're going to sub-divide the participial adjectives into past and present, thus creating a total of four buckets:

Adjectives
Descriptive	Possessive	Participial
red fast tall smelly	my your our his her its	Past Participial	Present Participial
		worn bruised broken	boiling crying bleeding

Descriptive Adjectives

Descriptive adjectives are probably what you think of when you hear the word "adjective".

• red dress
• fast car
• tall woman
• smelly dog
• a turkey dinner

Possessive Adjectives

Possessive adjectives show possession; in other words, they show that something belongs to something else.

• John's car
• his coat
• her book
• your smile
• their laughter
• my dog
• our meal

Participial Adjectives

Participial adjectives are formed from verbs. As noted above, there are two different kinds: present participles and past participles.

A "present participle" is a fancy name for the -ing form of a verb.

• a tempting cookie (tempting is the -ing form of the verb "to tempt").
• a fascinating book (fascinating is the -ing form of verb "to fascinate").
• a swimming rabbit (swimming is the -ing form of the verb "to swim").

A "past participle" is a fancy name for the "have" form of a verb.

• worn shoes (worn is the "have form" of the verb "to wear").
• bruised face (bruised is the "have form" of the verb "to bruise).
• broken arm (broken is the "have form" of the verb "to break").

We're not going to worry too much about participial adjectives just now; I simply mention them because they become important later in the course.

Simplifying Sentences with Adjectives

Some adjectives can be ignored, while others cannot. But here are some rules that generally hold true:

• Adjectives that come right before a noun should be canceled or ignored.
  • I like the red car.
• Possessive adjectives should be clumped together with the thing that they describe.
  • My father's truck is blue.

In the last example, above, "my father's truck" should be "clumped together" (think of it as just one "thing") and "blue" cannot be canceled because it's not in front of a noun. Therefore, that sentence is already in its simplest form, and cannot be reduced any further.

Study the following examples:

Original Sentence	Simplified Sentence
I like the red car.	I like the car.
Linda kicked the barking dog.	Linda kicked the dog
Freda rocked the crying baby.	Freda rocked the baby.
The angry dragon spread its enormous wings.	The dragon spread its wings.
I baked my mother a delicious Christmas cake.	I baked my mother a cake.
Joey is a horrible football player.	Joey is a player.
The boiling water evaporated.	The water evaporated.
All the children were very happy.	The children were happy.

Instructions for the Quiz

Answer the questions.

Quiz