Question

Pick out the adjectives from the following sentence, and say to which class each belongs:
A live donkey is better than a dead lion.
a) Live -adjective of quantity; better- demonstrative adjective
b) Live - adjective of quality; better-adjective of quality; dead- adjective of quality
c) Live -adjective of quality; better- distributive numeral adjective; dead- adjective of quality
d) Live - adjective of quality; dead- adjective of quality.

Answer 1

Hint: Adjectives are usually placed before the nouns they describe, as in the examples, tall man and easy assignment, above. Like nouns, adjectives are often recognizable by their suffixes. Endings such as -ous -ful -ish -able usually designate adjectives.

Complete answer:
> An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change the information given by the noun. Adjectives are one of the main parts of speech of the English language, although historically they were classed together with nouns.
> In the given question, we have to identify an adjective and tell its class. The 8 types of adjectives in English grammar with examples include proper, descriptive, quantitative, numeral, demonstrative, distributive, interrogative and possessive.
> In the question, donkey and lion are the nouns. The words ‘live’ and ‘dead’ tell something more about the character, i.e. the quality of the nouns donkey and lion, respectively.
- Here, the option ‘a’ is incorrect because ‘live' doesn’t tell how much, neither does ‘better’. So, they are not demonstrative adjectives.
- Option ‘b’ is also an incorrect option as ‘better’ is used for comparison, and so, is a comparative adjective and not an adjective of quality.
- Option ‘c’ is also incorrect because ‘better’ cannot be used for several groups.
- Option ‘d’ is the correct option because the adjective of Quality describes the state or characteristic of a noun, and as live and dead tell the quality of a noun, they are adjectives of quality.

Hence, option ‘d' is the correct option.

Note: Keep in mind that there can be more than one adjective in a sentence. For example, a sentence that reads, “The shy, brunette girl smiled,” “shy” and “brunette” are adjectives.