Adjective phrase
An adjective phrase (or adjectival phrase) is a phrase whose head word is an adjective, e.g. fond of steak, very happy, quite upset about it, etc. The adjective in an adjective phrase can initiate the phrase (e.g. fond of steak), conclude the phrase (e.g. very happy), or appear in a medial position (e.g. quite upset about it). The dependents of the head adjective - i.e. the other words and phrases inside the adjective phrase - are typically adverbs or prepositional phrases, but they can also be clauses (e.g. louder than you do). Adjectives and adjective phrases function in two basic ways in clauses, either attributively or predicatively. When they are attributive, they appear inside a noun phrase and modify that noun phrase, and when they are predicative, they appear outside the noun phrase that they modify and typically follow a linking verb (copula).
Examples
The adjective phrases are underlined in the following example sentences, the head adjective in each of these phrases is in bold, and how the adjective phrase is functioning—attributively or predicatively—is stated to the right of each example:
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