adjectivereich

Adjectivereich is a coined term used in linguistics and corpus studies to describe a property of language or text: a high richness and variety of adjectives. The word combines the English noun adjective with the German-derived suffix reich, meaning rich, and is often used to characterize descriptive or stylistic phenomena rather than to denote a formal language category. In some discussions, adjectivereich also functions as an adjective itself, e.g., an “adjectivereich text.”

In linguistic typology, adjectivereich describes languages or dialects that exhibit dense adjectival inventories and extensive inflection or agreement for adjectives. Such systems may display wide subject–noun–adjective concord, rich comparative and superlative morphology, and nuanced adjective derivation. The concept emphasizes not only the number of adjectives available but also their morphosyntactic versatility and how adjectives interact with nouns, pronouns, and determiners within a sentence.

In corpus and computational linguistics, adjectivereich can be used as a metric or descriptive frame. Researchers may measure adjective density (adjective tokens per thousand words), type–token variation among adjectives, or the range of inflectional forms. This can inform studies of stylistic variation, authorship, genre, and text planning, as well as affect natural language processing tasks such as part-of-speech tagging, morphological analysis, and machine translation, where high adjective variety can pose specific challenges and opportunities.

Critically, the concept is qualitative and domain-dependent; what counts as adjectivereich can vary by genre, register, language, and annotation scheme. It remains a descriptive tool rather than a fixed linguistic category. See also adjectives, morphology, and corpus linguistics.