3. Position of adjectives: attributive and predicative use

A. Adjectives in 1 a-e come before their nouns: this book, each person, which pen, my house and called attributive adjectives.

B. Adjectives of quality, however, can be used either before their nouns, i.e. attributively: a happy man a clever boy a nice day

or after certain verbs, i.e. predicatively. These verbs are called link verbs.

They are:

a) be, become, seem

b) appear, feel, get/grow (=become), keep look (=appear), make, smell, sound, taste, turn.

But a problem with verbs in group b) is that when they are not used as link verbs they can be modified by adverbs in the usual way.

Compare: She turned pale(adjective). (=She became pale) - She turned angrily (adverb).

The soup tasted strange. (adjective) - He tasted that dish suspiciously. (adverb)

C. Some adjectives can be used only attributively or only predicatively, and some can move from one position to the other, very often with the change of meaning. Compare how the meaning of early and late depend on their position: an early/late train means a train scheduled to run early or late in the day. The train is early/late means that it is before/after its proper time.