Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 206):
As a category, qualities lie somewhere along a cline between things and processes, and their status varies considerably among different languages. In English, qualities belong more closely with things, since they contribute primarily to the construction of participants: grammatically, English favours construing a quality as Epithet in a nominal group, and the class of adjective is clearly related to that of noun. (By contrast, in Chinese, where qualities are typically construed clausally, as Attribute, rather than nominally, as Epithet, the adjective is clearly related to the verb.)