Nonadjective

Nonadjective is a term used in linguistics and grammar to denote any word class that does not function as an adjective. In this sense, it stands in contrast to adjectives, which modify nouns or noun phrases and often inflect for degree or comparison. The label nonadjective is not a fixed universal category; its precise scope depends on the language and the grammatical framework being used.

In English discourse, many word classes are nonadjectival: nouns, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, numerals when used as determiners, and functional words such as prepositions, conjunctions, determiners, and interjections. Some words can serve as adjectives in certain functions but belong to another class in a given analysis (for example, participles functioning as verbs or adjectives depending on context; or homographs that may function as different parts of speech). The concept is particularly common in computational grammar and POS tagging, where automated classifiers label tokens as adjectives or nonadjectives to drive parsing and morphological rules.

Limitations of the category include its lack of universality. Languages with different morphosyntactic systems may partition words differently, and some words blur boundaries by serving multiple functions across contexts (for instance, a word that can act as both a noun and an attributive modifier). In practice, the nonadjective label is a practical tool for analysis and annotation in some grammars and corpora, but it should be understood as context-dependent rather than a rigid universal class.

See also: adjective, parts of speech, grammar, POS tagging.