Syntactic functions of adjectives

Adjectives are words that describe or modify another person or thing in the sentence. An adjective qualifies or describes a noun or pronoun. Adjectives can also be identified by their inflections and position or function in the sentence.
We cannot tell weather a word is an adjective by looking at it in isolation: the form does not necessarily indicate its syntactic function. Some suffixes are indeed found only with adjectives, eg: -ous, but many common adjectives have no identifying shape, eg: good, hot, little, young, fat. Nor can we identify a word as an adjective merely by considering what inflection or affixes it will allow.
Attributive adjectives are part of the noun phrase headed by the noun they modify; for example, happy is an attributive adjective in “happy people”.