Adjectives Acting – As Noun, As Verbs

ADJECTIVES ACTS AS NOUN: 

• The common way we use adjectives as nouns is to talk about groups. 
• A group is a collection of many things or people that can be described as adjectives. 
• Adjectives are used to describe a group of things or people will follow the article. 
• Examples: The rich, the poor, the strong, the weak, the old, the young, the willing, the brave, the blessed, the confident, etc. 
• Here the young is talking about the young people as a group. 
• Some adjectives don’t follow “the”. 
• Let’s see an example of an adjective that becomes a noun without following “the”. 

‘How does your city government help its homeless?’ 

• Here “homeless” is a noun that talks about the collection of people who live on the street in the city. 
• We learned that these adjectives used as nouns talk about groups of people or things. 
• Group is a singular countable noun and singular countable nouns can’t be used by themselves. 
• When the noun means a group, it follows the same rule as all singular countable nouns. 
• The new noun will usually follow the article “THE”, but it will sometimes follow a possessive form. 

ADJECTIVES ACT AS VERBS: 

• Verbs are action words used to describe a state or occurrence, and form the main part of the predicate of a sentence, such as hear, become, happen, etc. 
• Adjectives are words that describe or alter another person or thing in a sentence.  
• One type of adjective procures from and derives its meaning from verbs.  

• It is generally called a participle adjective as it is formed from a verb’s participle form. 
• Deverbal adjectives are adjectives derived from verbs. 
• Facilitative and agentive adjectives are some of the kinds of adjectives derived from verbs.   
• The suffix –I’ve is attached to the following verbs to procure adjectives.

Examples

Attract – Attractive 

Elude – Elusive 

• Sometimes the present participle (verb+ing) form of a verb becomes an adjective. 
• Example: 

“A rolling rock gathers no algae.” 

• In some situations, the past participle form of a verb becomes an adjective. 
• Such adjectives are sometimes called participle or verbal adjectives.