Adjective groups

That's it! Adjective groups are a definitely wildly fascinating grammatical topic, but for now we are done dissecting them!

What did we learn?

• Adjectives are qualities that describe things.
• Adjectives can be combined into adjective groups.
• Adjective groups usually come right before a noun, or after a noun + being-verb combo.
• Adjective groups can have four components:
  • Describers convey qualities such as crisp or turbulent
  • Classifiers convey categories of thing such as a French thing or a steel thing
  • Intensifiers change the intensity of a describer as in very hot or somewhat cold
  • Qualifiers modify a describer beyond simple intensity, as in strangely hypnotic toad
• Only describers can use intensifiers and qualifiers. Classifiers can't be intensified or qualified (although phrases like "He is very French" prove that rules are made to be broken).

And that's it!

If you are happy with all that, you will be able to analyse the way any 'thing' is described. Even this groovy-looking thing:

Where did the snippets come from?

We took snippets from a few different texts this lesson, but most of them came from these three:

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is Roald Dahl's classic tale of confectionary beyond your wildest dreams.

R.J. Palacio's Wonder follows the school life of a boy, Auggie, who has an extraordinary facial difference, and is attending a mainstream school for the first time in grade 5.

The Secret Commonwealth is the second installment of fantasy trilogy, The Book of Dust. Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon find themselves caught up in a world of complex and dangerous factions, even as they navigate their own fraught relationship.

See you next time!