6 Summary of Week 5

Adjectives are an incredibly useful word class. We can use them to:

• single out which particular item or idea you are referring to (which dog, house, subfield of quantum physics, etc.)
• say (or ask) what someone, something or some place is like
• make something sound more (or less!) attractive and interesting
• make people think (by using adjectives in a surprising or puzzling way).

You’ve now considered the three largest classes of words in English (nouns, verbs and adjectives) so you’re well on your way to being able to describe language accurately. From now on the emphasis will increasingly be on how these and other word classes are combined in sentences and whole texts.

Next week you will look at the smaller sets of words which form the connections between words from the larger classes. Some of these words have already been mentioned in passing – pronouns and determiners, for example – but now you will give them more attention.

You can now go to Week 6 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .