The Major Parts of Speechexample, former can only occur as a noun modifier (The former senator vs. The
senator is former) and alive, asleep, askew can occur only predicatively (The
alive/asleep cat vs. The cat is alive/asleep).
Exercise
Check the words former, asleep, alive, askew in your dictionary to see
if their limitations are mentioned. Then check them in a dictionary
designed for learners of English as a second language, such as the Cam-
bridge International Dictionary of English, to see how they are treated
there.
Clearly, adjectives may modify nouns. But because the ability to modify a
noun is neither a necessary nor a sufficient basis for adjectivehood, we must
augment the functional criteria with more reliable formal ones.
Formal characteristics of adjectives
The major formal characteristic of an adjective is its ability to be compared:
analytic test 7a. A word may be an adjective if it can be made comparative
and/or superlative by the addition of the inflectional suffixes {-er} and {-est}. (Ap-
plies to short words.)
analytic test 7b. A word may be an adjective if it can be made compara-
tive and/or superlative by being modified by more and most. (Applies to longer
words.)
Exercise
Create four test frames for adjectives based on Analytic Tests 7a and
7b. Apply your frames to show that traditional, perfect, unfavorable,
similar, and subordinate may be adjectives.
Comparison is a semantic change in adjectives that is regularly signaled by
formal means. The uninflected forms are in the positive degree; the inflected
forms are in the comparative and the superlative.