adjectivetype

Adjectivetype is a label used in linguistics and some natural language processing resources to classify adjectives according to their grammatical behavior in a language. It captures patterns of distribution, agreement, and placement with respect to nouns, as well as how adjectives inflect or fail to inflect.

Syntactic distribution distinguishes attributive adjectives, which modify a noun directly (the red apple), from predicative adjectives, which appear in the predicate with a copular verb (the apple is red). Some languages also allow post-nominal adjectives or show restrictions on where adjectives may appear relative to the noun.

Morphology and agreement vary by language. In English, adjectives generally do not agree with nouns for number or gender and typically do not inflect. In languages such as Spanish or German, adjectives agree with the noun in gender, number, and sometimes case, and may appear before or after the noun depending on language and meaning.

Semantically, adjectivetypes are often grouped into descriptive or qualitative adjectives (color, size, quality), classifying or relational adjectives (origin, material, function), and a smaller set of derived or deadjectival adjectives. These categories help describe how adjectives contribute to noun meaning and interact with syntax.

In cross-linguistic work, adjectivetype helps linguists compare how languages encode adjectival information, and it informs NLP tasks such as parsing, agreement modeling, and adjective-based generation.