Nominalization of Adjectives and Verbs

Welcome to class!

In today’s class, we will be talking about the nominalization of adjectives and verbs. Enjoy the class!

Nominalization of Adjectives and Verbs

You learned in the last class what nominalization is. Today, we’ll dwell more on converting words from other parts of speech into adjectives and verbs.

Let’s talk about the nominalization of adjectives first.

Remember adjectives are words we use to qualify or add more information to nouns. But it is also possible to convert words to adjectives from the noun with an attachment of the right suffix.

Can you think of the proper suffix to add (or what you can do) to the following words to convert them to adjectives?

Try it…

Courage Storm

Envy Tragedy

Girl Trouble

Gold Accident

Laugh Length

Let me show you how to discover the adjective form of the words, taking ‘courage’ as an example.

Try to use courage in a sentence. Of course, you won’t say that ‘the man is courage.’ You’d probably say ‘the man has courage’.

Now see if you can use an extension of that ‘courage’ in adjective form. Remember we have two types of adjectives. To use the adjective form of ‘courage’ in the attributive you would say ‘That is the ___________ man’. And to use it in the predicative form you would say ‘That man is ___________’.

Did you get the adjective form right?

The word is ‘courageous.’

But even if you didn’t get it right, you can still use the same explanation to determine the adjectival form of the other nouns listed above.

Let me tell you the next two, then you do the remaining by yourself or with the aid of your dictionary

Envy – envious

Girl – girlish

Now let’s do the same for verbs,

You can discover verbs from either adjectives or nouns with the addition of prefixes or suffixes.

The following words (noun and adjectives) will need a prefix each to change them to verbs.

Able Courage

Friend Joy

Rich Slave

But for the exception of one, you would probably get everything if you get the right prefix to add to the first word, ‘able’.

Did you get it? If you can’t yet, use the explanation I gave you above. We are trying to covert those words to a verb, isn’t it?

Okay!

Now think of a verb you know and use it in a sentence. You might want to write the sentence down. Then remove the verb and see if you can replace it with any of the words above. Of course, it won’t fit in since it is a noun. But is it possible to think of anything you could add to that word to make it fit in?

Okay. Let me tell you here. The suffix to add is ‘en-‘, with the exception of ‘friend’ which needs the prefix ‘be-‘ to change it to ‘befriend’. So you have:

enable encourage

befriend enjoy

enrich enslave

I hope you understood everything I taught you today.