WORD CLASS: ADJECTIVES. GENERALITIES

1. Adjectives share a great deal of features with nouns, such as inflection. Actually all the endings used for both gender inflection and number inflection are also to be found in adjectives. However, adjectives have one more kind of inflection: comparison, which is a category adjectives also share with adverbs.

2. Adjectives may work as nouns in most cases. As a matter of fact, certain words may be either. Adjectives working as nouns are preceded by determiners. Their equivalence with English may vary, since English adjectives do not work as nouns as a rule, except in a few cases when they do not take plural endings:

els morts no es queixen	dead (people) do not complain
tots els malalts de tifus són a una secció especial de l’hospital	all typhus patients are placed in a special section of the hospital
m’agrada la blanca	I like the white one

Adjectives working as nouns are obviously predicative ones

3. As in most Romance languages, attributively-used adjectives are normally placed after nouns (post-nominal position):

la casa groga	the yellow house
el dies estiuencs	the summer days

However, adjectives may be placed before nouns in certain cases:

a) A few adjectives show different meanings when placed before or after the noun:

un públic gran	a large (amount of) audience
un gran públic	a great audience

un regal petit	a small present
un petit regal	a little present

b) Some adjectives take an emphatic value when place before the noun

ens queda un llarg camí	we still have a long way ahead
és una estupenda idea	it’s a great idea

c) Pre-nominal position may have stylistic goals, so that certain uses would be acceptable in literary language but not in the colloquial speech.

era un ric home (literary)	he was a rich man
era un home ric (normal speech)

4. Adjectives agree in gender and number with the noun they depend on (see agreement):

el noi petit	the little boy
els nois petits	the little boys
la noia petita	the little girl
les noies petites	the little girls

5. Catalan knows feminine forms for such adjectives like fort > forta (=strong) or verd > verda (=green), unlike Portuguese, Spanish or Italian.