A study of Adjective and adjectival phrase in English With reference to English Language Learners

Abstract

Adjectives, in fact, are words such as tall, round, happy, etc that describe nouns (persons or a things ) in sentences. The term adjective is a problematic faces Iraqi SELL students since its form is complicated in most of cases , some adjectives have one word which are called simple adjectives others are of more than one word which are called compound adjectives. However, linguists today distinguish determiners from adjectives, considering them to be two parts of speech, but traditionally; determiners were considered adjectives in some of their uses. Adjectives act as a head of adjective phrase , the syntactic role of adjective in adjectival phrase is attributive and predicative . Generally speaking, adjectives have different forms in English, they can be nouns present and past participle etc. In addition, most of adjectives have comparative and superlative forms. Finally, this study has found that Iraqi ELL tend to use limited number of adjectives like big, beautiful, nice ect. Simple adjectives are very common more than compound ones. In addition to, adjectives are invariable in English and do not agree with nouns in number and gender with exception of the adjective beautiful. This study has also ended with some recommendations.