A Companion to the Higher English Grammar Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: but merely their relation to the act of speaking'. They are, therefore, relational names. DEFINITION OP THE ADJECTIVE. The old and familiar definition of the Adjective is?' the word expressing the quality of a noun'. Varied thus:?' the kind or quality of a noun'; ' to qualify a noun, or distinguish it from others of the same name '; ' used with a noun to denote some quality, attribute, or fact, which we connect in thought with that for which the noun stands, so that the adjective and noun together form a compound description ' (Mason). It would take a good deal of explanation to make a beginner understand what is meant by a quality ; to the apprehension of children, Quality is on a level with Quiddity and Nonentity. Evidently the meaning is very little present to the minds of either the young or the old ; for while the definition states that all adjectives express quality, the classification of them under Quantity and Quality, implies that some do not signify a quality. Dr. Latham, who excels in the Logic of Grammar, says? ' A word capable, by itself, of forming the Predicate, but not capable of forming the subject of a Proposition, is called an Adjective '. This is an important circumstance respecting the Adjective, but is not well suited for a definition. He goes on : ' An Adjective shows that the substantive with which it is united possesses a certain quality'. The first fact to be stated respecting the Adjective is that it is the adjunct of the noun, as the adverb is of the verb. The next fact is that the adjective and the noun together make but one meaning, and that meaning different from the meaning of the noun alone: ' tall man', although two words, has only one meaning, and that is different from the meaning of ' man' by itself. The Adjective alone has not a...Read More