Page 242 - Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies 2009

Chapter 15: Stop Press! Student to Deliver Sentence
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Running through the types of adjectives
Adjectives come in three main flavours: describing, identifying and quantify- ing. The following sections take you through the uses of each variety.
Describing
Many adjectives tell you what the noun is like. For example, instead of just talking about a bag, you can say that it’s a large, leather bag. The descriptive adjectives tell you that the bag is large and leather.
Some examples of descriptive adjectives are:
✓ Colours: Blue, turquoise, pale.
✓ Materials: Woollen, metallic, granite.
✓ Shapes: Oval, rectangular, round.
✓ Opinion: Nasty, tremendous, absurd.
✓ Tastes: Bitter, tasty, sweet.
✓ Comparatives and superlatives: Better, best, most exciting. ✓ Nationalities: British, Jamaican, Irish.
Identifying
At times the adjective tells you who a noun belongs to. These words are called possessive adjectives. So rather than saying the jacket of my brother, you can use ’s after the name of the person who owns something (my broth- er’s jacket) or use a possessive adjective, his jacket.
The possessive adjectives are:
✓ My
✓ Your
✓ His/her/its ✓ Our
✓ Their
Or you can point out which noun you’re referring to by using these adjec- tives, which are a little more specific than using an article:
✓ This ✓ These ✓ That ✓ Those