Patternadjective

Patternadjective is a term used in linguistics and data description to describe a class of adjectives that encode information about patterns or regularities rather than about the intrinsic properties of the noun they modify. The concept treats adjectives like regular, cyclic, or stochastic as markers of structure, recurrence, or distribution patterns observed in objects, events, or data sets.

In English and other languages, patternadjectives commonly occupy attributive and predicative positions much like ordinary qualitative adjectives: a regular pattern, the sequence is cyclic. Some languages permit explicit degree modification, yielding forms such as more regular or highly irregular, when the intention is to compare pattern types rather than quality.

Semantics and typology: patternadjectives primarily convey information about pattern type, frequency, or organization rather than material or color. They can be descriptive (the pattern is regular) or evaluative (the pattern is highly irregular). Examples include regular, irregular, cyclic, stochastic, and predictable. The same adjectives may function in metaphorical descriptions of behavior or text corpora.

Relation to other concepts: patternadjectives overlap with technical terms in data science, such as descriptors used in pattern mining and time-series analysis, where researchers label discovered patterns. They also intersect with qualitative adjectives in grammar, where function is to communicate structural properties of a system. See also pattern language, adjective, grammar.