You are paying less attention to your studies than you used to do.
What is “less” in this sentence?
A. Noun
B. Verb
C. Adverb
D. Adjective
I was studying English mcqs at a particular website which says less indicate adjective in that context but as far as I know:
Adjective: it is a word which is the characteristics of noun.
Adverb: it is a word or phrase that modifies the meaning of an adjective, verb, or other adverb, expressing manner, place, time or degree
So my question is, in the example above does not the word less showing less intensity towards attention? It does not indicate any behaviour or characteristic of attention. So the answer should be ADVERB, shouldn't it?
Best Answer
Your definition of an adjective is somewhat misleading. The classic definition is that an adjective MODIFIES a noun. That may mean assigning a physical characteristic such as color to a noun, e.g. "the red ball," but adjectives are not limited to physical characteristics. "Modify" means almost anything that helps narrow the meaning of a noun. So in the context of your example, which is a comparison, "attention" could conceivably be more or less or the same as it was previously. The sentence would literally be meaningless if the range of meaning of the noun "attention" was not restricted to one of those three options. Because "less" in this example affects the range of meaning of a noun, it is being used as an adjective.
EDIT: "Less" is one of a small class of modifying words in English that do not morphologically indicate when they are being used as an adverb or an adjective by the presence or absence of the suffix "ly." So the word "less" may be used as an adverb: "She is less exuberant than she was in college." In that example, "less" is restricting the meaning of an adjective rather than a noun and so is classed as an adverb rather than a noun.