Inflectional suffixes: adjectives

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This is the last of three blog posts about inflectional suffixes, which are part of the grammar of English. This post is about inflectional suffixes for/creating adjectives.

The obvious ones are the comparative and superlative suffixes added to words that are already adjectives, as in soft-softer-softest. Very straightforward, though ‘er’ is also a suffix that creates agent nouns, as in ‘dance-dancer’, and in ordinary speech, ‘est’ sounds the same as the agent noun suffix ‘ist’ as in ‘art-artist’ and ‘cycle-cyclist’. It’s worth instructing learners to stress the vowels in these suffixes, pronouncing them as you would if they were little words.

As discussed in the last blog post, the verb suffix ‘ing’ creates present participles, and the verb suffixes ‘ed’ and ‘en’ can be used to create past participles. Present and past participles are often used as adjectives, as in ‘a bleeding heart’, ‘a trusted friend’ or ‘there are known knowns, and unknown unknowns‘.

Here’s an almost four minute video about the use, pronunciation and spelling of suffixes that are added to/create adjectives. I hope it helps you explain them to kids. Again, sorry if Youtube shows you an ad during the video, I am trying to work out how to turn all ads off.