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Adjectives and Adjectival Phrases

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Adjectives. Adjectives describe nouns. Adjectives answer the question which noun or what kind of noun? So, for example, the red bird tells us what kind of bird or which bird. The expensive house tells us what kind of house or which house and so forth with all these adjectives.

Adjectives. Adjectives may follow a form of the verb, to be and this is called a predicate adjective. So for example, the sky is blue, the reason is clear. These are adjectives following the form verb, to be. The postponement is due to rain, very important to appreciate that the word due is in fact, an ordinary adjective.

And this will have enormous implications later on in the diction videos, what we can do with the word due and what we can't do with the word due because it's an adjective. Adjectives may also follow verb plus object for certain verbs. So things like she will paint the room white. He makes the teacher mad.

So this is actually a totally correct valid grammatical form. You are not likely to see this on the GMAT sentence correction but just in case, just so you know, this is perfectly correct, it is much more common in colloquial speech. The role of an adjective may be played by a group of words, a phrase or a clause. This is called an adjectival phrase or an adjectival clause. So this would be a group of words that is modifying a noun.

Incidentally, I'll just point out here, we'll discuss in much greater detail in later videos what a phrase is, what a clause is, the differences in these. Right now it's just sufficient to know that a phrase and a clause these are both just words, these are both terms for group of words. A clause is a group of words that has a verb inside of it. A phrase is a group of words that doesn't have a verb inside of it.

That's all you need to know at this point. So examples of adjectival phrases and these are various groups of words that act as adjectives that is to say they're describing. The noun, or they're modifying the noun. These are examples of adjectival clauses, and notice there's a noun and a verb, you always have a noun and a verb and a clause, these are groups of words that are also just modifying the noun.

And again, some of them can be very short, and some of them, especially the clauses, can get very, very long. And of course it would probably not a surprise to you on the GMAT sentence correction you're gonna see some very long clauses. So for summary, any phrase or clause on the GMAT sentence correction, it's always important to determine what role does this group of words play.

An adjectival phrase or clause modifies a noun as an adjective word, so, it's very important always to know exactly what role each phrase or clause is playing in the sentence.

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