Adjective

According to the morphological composition adjectives are subdivided into simple (good, fine), derived (beautiful, dependent, documentary) and compound (coulour-blind, deaf-mute, well-known, heart-breaking, fair-haired).

The grammatical meaning – to denote quality or state of a substance.

The grammatical form is determined only by one grammatical category: the degrees of comparison. It's a threefold opposition consisting of the three forms: positive, comparative and superlative. The are three ways of forming degrees of comparison:

• synthetic method with the suffixes –er, -est which concerns monosyllabic and some disyllabic adjectives: nice – nicer – the nicest; happy – happier – the happiest;

• analytical method with the auxiliary words more and most which concerns polysyllabic adjectives: more beautiful- the most beautiful

• Irregular method: good – better – the best, bad – worse – the worst, little – less – the least, many / much – more – the most, far – farther / further – the farthest / the furthest.

The syntactic functions: an attribute, a predicative ( = part of the compound nominal predicate).

As we can see the English adjective differs a lot from the Russian adjective. The latter besides the category of degrees of comparison has the grammatical categories of number (красный – красные), gender (красная, красный, красное), and case (красная, красной, красному, красным и т.д.) which agree with the modified noun according to the rules of Russian grammar.

The English category of the degrees of comparison doesn’t cover all English adjectives. Like in Russian some semantic groups of the adjective (relative adjectives) don’t form degrees of comparison due to their meaning: previous, middle, left, right, dead, woolen, wooden, former, latter, inner, upper, senior, junior and the like.

Though some authors for stylistic purposes can resort to unusual forms: You cannot be deader than dead. Todt was the deadest of them all. (E.Hemingway)

The paradigm of a simple adjective can be represented by the following forms

positive	large
comparative	larger
superlative	(the) largest

Of a polysyllabic adjective

Positive	difficult
Comparative	more difficult / less difficult
superlative	(the) most difficult / (the) least difficult

Of a relative adjective

Positive	Wooden, synthetic, analytical
Comparative	----
superlative	-----

English adjectives as well as Russian ones can pass over into the class of nouns through the process called sustantivization. In this case they acquire most if not all the noun’s grammatical characteristics. In Russian: рабочий, молодые, прекрасное, сытый голодного не разумеет.

In English: a relative, a native, a conservative, a Russian, a Chinese, the Chinese, the rich, the young, the brave, the useful, in the affirmative, in the negative, the short for Robert is Bob; What is the English for …? It is all for the best. Red is my favourite colour.

The reverse process, adjectivization of nouns is typical of English too: stone wall, peace talks, speech sound, goods van.

The usual position of the adjective is before the noun, still there are cases with the adjective in the post position to the noun: the only person visible; all the people present; from times immemorial; page ten, I’d like to read something interesting; there is nothing extraordinary, I’d like to speak with somebody very clever on the subject.

If the noun is modified by a number of adjectives, their order (succession) is more important in English than in Russian.

Generally the succession of adjectives before a noun is the following.

	5	4	3	2	1
determiners	quality	colour	age	material	Nationality, origin	noun
A	luxurious	red	old	woolen	Turkish	carpet
A	bright	yellow	brand new	silk	Benneton	blouse

If all the adjectives belong to the same semantic group, the order of such attributes is not relevant, it can be changed easily. Let’s have a look at the sentence from Thackery (Vanity Fair): Amelia Sedley had such a kindly, smiling, tender, generous heart of her own as won the love of everybody who came near her. – all the adjectives here are qualitative.

Adverb

The grammatical meaning – to denote circumstances or characteristics which modify or intensify an action, state or quality.

The grammatical forms are determined by the category of degrees of comparison which mostly coincide with the corresponding adjectives:

Good / well – better – best

Bad / badly – worse – worst

Quick / quickly – quicker .more quickly – quickest / most quickly

Loud / loudly – louder – loudest

The syntactic functions: various adverbial modifies (of manner, place, time, degree and some others): to speak aloud, to run quickly, then, there, outside.

The formal indicator of an adverb is the suffix –ly.

Still many adverbs coincide with adjectival forms: A fast train, to run fast, early, late, hard, long, far.

Some adverbs can be used both with or without the suffix, though their meanings may be absolutely different. Compare: hard – hardly, late – lately, near – nearly, pretty – prettily.

He works hard. / He could hardly say a word.

He came near. It was nearly closing time.