Page 55 - DENG103_English - I

English–I

Notes
whereas in the UK, “over 40,000 traffic deaths” would be acceptable. Even in the U.S.,
however, you will commonly hear “over” in numerical expressions of age, time, or height:
“His sister is over forty; she’s over six feet tall. We’ve been waiting well over two hours
for her.”

Task Explain the degrees of adjective with suitable examples.

5.2 The Order of Adjectives in a Series

It would take a linguistic philosopher to explain why we say “little brown house” and not
“brown little house” or why we say “red Italian sports car” and not “Italian red sports car.”
The order in which adjectives in a series sort themselves out is perplexing for people learning
English as a second language. Most other languages dictate a similar order, but not necessarily
the same order. It takes a lot of practice with a language before this order becomes instinctive,
because the order often seems quite arbitrary (if not downright capricious). There is, however,
a pattern. You will find many exceptions to the pattern in the table below, but it is definitely
important to learn the pattern of adjective order if it is not part of what you naturally bring
to the language.
The categories in the following table can be described as follows:
(i) Determiners—articles and other limiters.
(ii) Observation—post determiners and limiter adjectives (e.g., a real hero, a perfect idiot) and
adjectives subject to subjective measure (e.g., beautiful, interesting)
(iii) Size and Shape—adjectives subject to objective measure (e.g., wealthy, large, round)
(iv) Age—adjectives denoting age (e.g., young, old, new, ancient)
(v) Colour—adjectives denoting colour (e.g., red, black, pale)
(vi) Origin—denominal adjectives denoting source of noun (e.g., French, American, Canadian)
(vii) Material—denominal adjectives denoting what something is made of (e.g., woolen, metallic,
wooden)
(viii) Qualifier—final limiter, often regarded as part of the noun (e.g., rocking chair, hunting cabin,
passenger car, book cover)

Determiner Observation Physical Description Origin Material Qualifier Noun
Size Shape Age Colour
a beautiful old Italian touring car
an expensive antique silver mirror
four gorgeous long- red silk roses
stemmed
her short black hair
our big old English sheepdog
those square wooden hat boxes
that dilapidated little hunting cabin
several enormous young American basketball players
some delicious Thai food

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