ABSTRACT
In accordance with whether adjectives denote a quality, a relation or possession, they are divided into three types: qualitative adjectives, relational adjectives and possessive adjectives.
Qualitative adjectives form the majority of adjectives. They express the qualities possessed or exhibited by persons, things or abstract phenomena, e.g. dóber ‘good’; slàb ‘bad’; sméšen ‘funny’; lép ‘beautiful’; gŕd ‘ugly’; stàr ‘old’; mlád ‘young’; bél ‘white’; glúh ‘deaf’; širòk ‘wide’; dêbel ‘fat’ etc. Some adjectives express a quality in relation to another quality; e.g. stàr ‘old’ is only really understood by comparing the quality it expresses with the opposite quality expressed by the adjective mlád ‘young’. In other words they do not express an absolute quality but rather the speaker’s comparative assessment of a given quality. This type of qualitative adjective occurs as one of a pair of antonyms and can express degrees of a quality, e.g. lép ‘beautiful’, lépši ‘more beautiful’, nàjlépši ‘most beautiful’. Other qualitative adjectives express objectively observable facts and generally speaking cannot express degrees of a given quality (at least in their direct, non-figurative meanings), e.g. bél ‘white’; šépav ‘lame’; mŕtev ‘dead’; nág ‘naked’; usáhel ‘withered’.
